Book excerpt: Gregory Dawson, a middle-aged and disillusioned writer, is holed up in a Cornish hotel working on a film script he must finish. A chance encounter with an old acquaintance in the bar sends him back to the England of 1913, when he was just eighteen and longed to enter the seemingly magical world of the glamorous Alington family and its three lovely daughters. Replaying the events of those days in his mind, Dawson relives a long-forgotten story that ended with a mysterious tragedy whose effects linger on in the present and threaten to shatter his placid existence ... In the vein of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, J. B. Priestley's Bright Day (1946) is one of his finest works and his own favorite of his novels, a haunting and unforgettable evocation of a vanished England as yet unravaged by the devastation of two world wars. "One of the best of J. B. Priestley's novels . . . provides an opportunity to revalue a writer not merely hugely popular in his own day but also, with more than 100 titles to his credit, hugely prolific." - Francis King, The Spectator "A glow of the magic of poignant rediscovery." - Kirkus Reviews "I do not think Priestley has ever written anything better than this book." - News Chronicle