Use of Riches

by Unknown Author

Yellow covers with bright blue spine with gold stamping. 245 pages.

Genres: Novels, Fiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1957

About the author

Books with known authors are imported from Amazon to this profile. Please do not merge this profile into Unknown.

Reviews

[Nicholas Beck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some superb writing in an understated thought-provoking tale set post WW 2 in Italy finds our protagonists wrestling with questions about great art and the muses that inspire them. Craine is a banker and art lover/connoisseur whose world is turned upside down by an unforeseen event which upsets his formerly orderly world. J.I.M. Stewart masterfully details how he comes to terms with his changed circumstances.

[Rick Seery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Again 3.5.

Very agreeable.

[Kurishin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps most interesting is Stewart choice of narrative structure. The novel might have been more interesting had it been told from different viewpoints from unreliable narrators. That is not what we got from 1957 though. Stewart was a prodigious writer and an effort as described above might have been too much to ask.

[Martin Corrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Use of Riches seems to me to suffer from the length of its tail - or perhaps from a lack of new ideas to give the last third more bite. There is no doubt of the author's engagement with what may seem a tortuous plot, but there is little steam left in the tail.

[JoLynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A British banker travels to Italy to meet his wife's first husband's illegitimate son and arrange care for him. What he discovers there changes his life in a way he could not have imagined.

J.I.M. Stewart was a British professor of English. His novels are elegant, quiet stories, focusing mainly on school life, the art world, or upper middle class manners. He also wrote the marvelous Appleby mysteries under the name Michael Innes. If you enjoy wonderful, literate writing, and you happen to come across one of his novels - don't pass it up!