Product Description

One of twelve indispensable classic titles you'll want to treasure, at a price that allows you to collect them all. The perfect introduction to the depth and breadth of the superlative Vintage Classics list.'One of the great writers of the twentieth century whose work conjured up a world of earthly warmth and beauty' Independent

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #278790 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-09
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Synopsis
The England of this text is one of silence, of hard work and necessary patience, of white roads, rutted by hooves and cartwheels, and innocent of oil and petrol. It is the rich, sensuous world of childhood and youth in a remote Cotswold village, a world that has mostly vanished.

About the Author
Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, and was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age on nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as described in his book As I Walked Out one Midsummer Morning. In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter. Laurie Lee died in May 1997. In its obituary the Guardian wrote, 'He has a nightingale inside him, a capacity for sensuous, lyrical precisions'.

Customer Reviews

Be transported through time and space!
I love this book. Our headmaster often used to read passages from it in morning assemley decades ago, and it stayed with me since then. The language is beautifully eloquent, and the author gives us a wonderfully realistic look into country life all that time ago. I especially loved the chapter about his mother, describing her with such honesty but love too, that I felt I'd known her myself. This weekend read was better than a weekend break in the country !

Eloquent
This is a wonderfully told memoir of Lee's childhood in the remote Cotswold village of Stroud. He tells of how he grew up being raised in a one-parent family, his father having left them when he was just 3 years old. His mother believed for all of her life that one day her husband would return home to them, but sadly he never did. He used to send them a few pounds to support the home each week but Lee's life was one of poverty and hardship, yet he still took delight in many of the simple things in life. Lee's style of writing is beautifully descriptive and depicts a world before technology such as mobile phones and computers were even imagined. Sometimes funny, often sad, but extremely eloquently told, in this book Laurie Lee brings the distant past back to life and I highly recommend it.

A sort of cross between a novel and a biographical prose poem
This very richly written descriptive of a childhood so fondly remembered is a piece of pure writing, straight from the heart, and rightly stands as a classic. It is of course a thing of a type, and this type of work helps to show how hugely wide the category of 'novel' writing is. This is a work straddling the far border of fiction and factual based biography but written for the enjoyment of description and depiction by a lover of language. It's worth a read by anyone whatever they're tastes, but I expect not too many thriller readers will be drawn to reading it. I liked it because it's clearly written by a lover of both life and language, but did find it a very rich cake. I can actually see why some would dislike it as a novel. Those who pick up a novel wanting to be told a story, rather than simply be taken to another world, may well feel cheated by it. It is without doubt though beautifully written.