Blue cloth on boards. 320 pp. Owners bookplate on front pastedown. Volume has bumped top corners, slight edgewear. Jacket is worn on all the edges, faded spine. Front foldover is clipped. This maybe a BOMC copy. Now in clear cover. "A novel of France's turmoil during the occupation by Nazi Germany, it is focused around a love story. The narrator is Phyl, an American women living in France, who is in love with an Austrian ski-instructor, Wolfgang. This Kay Boyle's first book since her return from Europe where she has been living for nineteen years. It shows the effect of Nazi conquest on the daily life of the men and women of France. Miss Boyle has been the next-door neighbor of the people she describes. It is the next-door neighbor who hears the whisper of defeatism, the daily build-up of propaganda. It is the sensitive novelist who can record the glory of those whose spirits do not surrender. Primer for Combat is filled with details of disaster, vignettes of courage and cowardice, the subterranean, bitter jokes that travel among repressed people faster than wireless. They build up a unforgettable picture of a stunned, angry people, not sure where to turn its anger."

Fiction, Historical Novel, France, World War Two