Book description
The final volume, volume fifteen, of A Chronicle of Ancient
Sunlight. Phillip Maddison is living apart from his wife, Lucy, in the
year immediately following the Second World War. He has sold his farm
and handed over the proceeds in trust for the family excluding
himself. Now living alone on Exmoor he is as ever haunted by the past,
and his pro-German views bring him under constant fear of attack. A
love affair, the death of his father, and tender relationship with his
cousin's two daughters are particularly outstanding in a novel full of
incident; and this final novel in A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight
completes the history of Phillip Maddison while at the same time
rounding off an unsurpassed picture of fifty swiftly-changing years.
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.
