{"product_id":"2026200013706-secondhand-the-cardboard-crown","title":"The Cardboard Crown","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Very good\u003cbr\u003ePages: Tanning and foxing\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSet against the lush backdrop of colonial Australia and aristocratic England, The Cardboard Crown opens the sweeping Langton family saga through the eyes of a novelist-narrator who uncovers his grandmother Alice's intimate diaries, piecing together the hidden desires, social obligations, and quiet tragedies that shaped a dynasty across two continents. Martin Boyd chronicles the tension between the refined world of European sensibility and the raw, sun-scorched reality of Australian life, painting Alice as a woman of restless intelligence and suppressed passion, caught between duty and longing in an age that offered women little room for either.\n\nBoyd's prose is celebrated for its elegance and irony, suffused with a melancholy tenderness that recalls the finest traditions of Anglo-Australian literary fiction. The Cardboard Crown, first published in 1952, stands as the cornerstone of his Langton Quartet, a sequence widely regarded as one of the most ambitious and underappreciated achievements in Australian literature. Boyd presents a world where class, identity, and belonging are perpetually contested — and leaves the reader wondering whether the crown of social respectability is ever worth the cost of wearing it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49160909783259,"sku":"2026200013706-SECONDHAND","price":15.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/9d1510dc-857f-4244-ba5d-78d8432464f6.png?v=1787188371","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200013706-secondhand-the-cardboard-crown","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}