The Summer Ghosts  (Blond 1964) 

“The great strength of The Summer Ghosts lies in its ferocious love scenes which, for all their determined athleticism, can be read entirely without embarrassment; some achievement, this” [Sunday Times] 

“Brilliant!” [Books and Bookmen] 

“I read The Summer Ghosts and thought it was tremendous” [Colin Wilson]

SEIZURE OF ALEXIS LYKIARD’S FIRST NOVEL, 1969. Copies of the Panther paperback reprint of The Summer Ghosts, first published in this edition in UK 1966, were intercepted at Dublin and duly confiscated. Even more curiously, these few books, addressed to the author himself – then living in the Wicklow Mountains – were sent by Panther at his own request and for his personal use (i.e. as complimentaries for Irish friends). A curious question arises: weren’t the books, if not for sale, the writer’s property after all? A question never pursued or answered, either by the Irish ‘authorities’, or the publishers, or myself. I was busy with my fourth novel Strange Alphabet; Panther Books had sold many thousands of copies of my novel by then, and the publishers must have thought there was scarcely any need for further publicity or bother – especially given some of their larger-scale censorship and importation problems at the time with different groups of Irish moral arbiters, both religious and secular!