Book description
Volume eleven of The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Twelve hundred
acres of downland valley with a trout stream await an heir and Sir
Hilary Maddison wants his only nephew Phillip to learn farming the
hard way, beginning as a labourer and rising to a tenancy-for-life.
But Phillip has other ideas. Unable to forget the early death of his
wife Barley as well as his friends who died in the Great War, he needs
to recreate his past in his writing. Trying to combine both worlds
Phillip is bound to fail in one of them; and literary success only
intensifies the dilemma. 'The finest yet in Mr Williamson's long
series' Kenneth Allsop
Henry Williamson was born in December 1895 and died in August
1977. The last great visionary of his generation, he was both loved
and misunderstood and his writing by turns famous and neglected. His
huge literary output fell into several groups. Apart from his
well-loved animal narratives he wrote direct accounts of his own life
in rural Norfolk and Devon, numerous short stories and two
semi-autobiographical groups of novels - The Flax Dream and A
Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, of which the last volume, The Gale of
the World appeared in 1969. His last book, The Scandaroon, the tale of
a pigeon, was published in 1972.
