Give Me Your Answer, Do
Peter Marchant
September 27, 2022
ISBN 9798218061517 / Paperback / 208 pages / $18.99

First published in London in 1960 by Michael Joseph, Ltd., Give Me Your Answer, Do is the only novel by Peter Marchant, reissued here for the first time in a new edition.

Set in postwar England, the novel traces the emotional and moral uncertainties of its characters against a backdrop of social transition and private reckoning. Marchant’s prose is observant, psychologically exact, and attentive to the hesitations, evasions, and half-spoken desires that shape ordinary lives.

"A woman secretary, who bicycles every day from Ebury Street to Fenchurch Street and back, has from childhood (unhappy—parents divorced) indulged in conversations with an imaginary pony called Bradshaw. Older and socially superior to the cockney girl typists at the office, she has held herself aloof from them, but feeling out of it when they discuss their boy friends or forthcoming marriages she is goaded into announcing that she herself is engaged—to Bradshaw. She keeps up the deception when she is befriended and later desired by a middle-aged insurance clerk."
— The Daily Telegraph, London, April 14, 1960

"We know, of course, that a collision between Margaret's fantasy world and her real world is inevitable, but the tension derives from our uncertainty over just how disastrous that crash will be. I'll just say that Peter Marchant would have had Hollywood rom-com producers knocking on his door if he'd published this book in the 1990s instead of 1960. His ending is suspenseful, sappy, and satisfying in equal measure. . . . Comfortably nonconformist."
— Brad Bigelow, The Neglected Books Page, November 25, 2021