About Lyddy Thomas

New York: Random House. Fine in Very Good+ dj. (c.1947). First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [book is tight and clean, with no discernible wear; jacket also very nice, with just a bit of wear along the top of the front panel and a short closed tear at the bottom front hinge; see NOTE about stamp on front jacket flap]. The third novel by this underappreciated author, who will probably always be best-known for her first book, "Whistle Stop" (1941), but who achieved a little posthumous boost in her reputation when, following her death in 2002, the manuscript for an unpublished novel was discovered in her refrigerator, where she'd kept it for thirty years. (This book, "Sudden Rain," was published in 2005.) The title character here is a woman trapped in an abusive marriage to an ex-GI, with the plot described in the jacket blurb as involving "a set of dramatic situations which are inevitable in that they spring from the very stuff of life itself." A slug at the top of the front jacket flap states that the book "was given a special award in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Contest of 1947 and will be produced as a motion picture later." (It wasn't, actually, although her first two novels had been.) NOTE that the dust jacket has a small stamp at the top of the front flap that reads "Garden City Reprint" -- which doesn't quite jibe with the book (a stated first printing) or the rest of the jacket, both of which bear only the Random House imprint. (I've also compared this example to another I've had on hand, and they're identical in every respect except for the price-clipping and the "Garden City" stamp; so go figure.) .