Paperback. Orange cover with black title.

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A FROST PAPERBACK is a loved book which a member of the Frost family has checked for condition, cleanliness, completeness and readability. When the buyer collects their book, the delivery charge of £3.00 is not made

I bought this out of curiosity. Allan Barnsley, alias Gabriel Fielding was my GP when I was a child and I was at the same school as his younger children. But for this I would never have approached this book. Set against a backdrop of the Nazi dictatorship The Birthday King is an austere tale of the triumph of the human spirit in a time of adversity. The author was a deeply spiritual man and a devout Roman Catholic and his optimistic outlook shines through what is otherwise a bleak story. His prose is very literary and perhaps a little dated for modern tastes. Reading this book is not a life changing experience but it is a rewarding one – name withheld. 

Gabriel Fielding , pen name of Alan Gabriel Barnsley, was a British medical doctor-turned-novelist whose works include: The Frog Prince and Other Poems(1952), Brotherly Love (1954), Twenty –Eight Poems(1955), In the Time of Greenbloom (1956), Eight Days(1958), Through Streets Broad and Narrow (1961), The Birthday King ( 1963) Gentlemen in their Season(1966), New Queens for Old ( 1972), Pretty Doll Houses(1972) and The Women of Guinea Lane( 1986).

Awards include: St Thomas More Gold Medal 1963, W.H. Smith Award in 1964, Honorary Doctorate of Literature, Gonzaga University 1966, Washington State Governor’s Writer Award 1972, and Distinguished Professor W.S.U. 1981.

Fielding’s father, George, was an Anglican vicar at Hexham, Northumberland and his mother, Katherine Fielding Barnsley, was a descendant of the novelist Henry Fielding. His pen name was derived from his illustrious ancestor. He earned a B.A. from Trinity College, Dublin in 1939, with prizes in Anatomy and Biology. He graduated M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. from St. George’s Hospital, London in 1943. He was a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War II. His medical practice included general practice in Kent and part-time practice at Her Majesty’s Prison, Maidstone,England from 1952 to 1964. He once said, “Medicine, to me, was a sentence I had to fulfill in order to be free to write.”

His first book, The Frog Prince and Other Poems, was published in 1952 in England. In 1966 he moved to the United States, where he was author-in-residence at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Here he became professor of English literature, leaving his British medical practice behind forever.He retired in 1981.

Three of his books were later reissued in The Phoenix Fiction Editions through the University of Chicago Press in 1983-86.