Laurie Lee

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is the moving follow-up to Laurie Lee's acclaimed Cider with RosieAbandoning the Cotswolds village that raised him, the young Laurie Lee walks to London. There he makes a living labouring and playing the violin. But, deciding to travel further a field and knowing only the Spanish phrase for 'Will you please give me a glass of water?', he heads for Spain. With just a blanket to sleep under and his trusty violin, he spends a year crossing Spain, from Vigo in the north to the southern coast. Only the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War puts an end to his extraordinary peregrinations . . .'He writes like an angel and conveys the pride and vitality of the humblest Spanish life with unfailing sharpness, zest and humour' Sunday Times

She was an artist, a light-giver, and an original, and she never for a moment knew it. Laurie Lees deft but sublime summarisation of his mother tells you all you need to know about one of the great masters of our language. Lees account of his early childhood in a small, backwater country village in the Cotswolds is a classic memoir of times past already on the wane and now gone beyond memory. This is a place of bare feet, untrammelled woods and quiet lanes untroubled by cars. Well-known and equally well-loved, echoes of Cider with Rosie exist everywhere from the cornflower skies in Grahame Swifts Waterland and H.E. Bates lusty, rustic Larkin books to adverts for Hovis bread. In some ways, Cider with Rosie is one of those books at risk of invisibility through sheer, apparent familiarity, but this month we invite you to drink deep from a fine work you always promised yourself youd read. Part-memoir, part-sharp-sided polemic that is potentially darker than the bucolic idyll you might imagine, this is a work that continues to stand as one of the great novels of the last century. Happily, the book has grown during its long intervals: not only between Lees post- first-world-war childhood and his writing about it in the late 1950s, but between both those times and now. - Jeremy Treglown, The Spectator

"Los últimos días de mi infancia fueron también los últimos días de la aldea. Yo pertenecía a aquella generación que vio, por casualidad, el final de una vida milenaria. [...] Yo, mi familia, mi generacion, nacimos en un mundo de silencio; en un mundo de trabajo duro y necesaria paciencia, un mundo de espaldas dobladas hacia la tierra, cuidado manual de los cultivos, dependencia de la meteorologia y de la cosecha; un mundo en que las aldeas eran naves en paisajes vacios y las distancias entre ellas largas; un mundo de caminos marcados por cascos y ruedas de carretas, no hollados por la gasolina y el petroleo, apenas transitados por las personas y casi nunca por placer, por los que lo que mas rapido se movia eran los caballos." Laurie Lee revive en esta novela, una de las mas queridas y leidas por sus compatriotas, su infancia en una aldea de la campiña inglesa. Pese a nacer en 1914, un mes antes del comienzo de la Primera Guerra Mundial, sus recuerdos son amables y llenos de cariño hacia un mundo que iba a desaparecer.

Nacido en un mundo donde lo más veloz que se conocía era el caballo, el autor ve cómo, hacia 1920, desaparece un sistema de vida que había perdurado durante mil años. Entrañable memoria de una Inglaterra rural, menos opulenta y mucho mas feliz.

A landmark collection of poems from the author of Cider with RosieLaurie Lee is beloved for his writing on a lost rural world His evocative poetry springs from his deep connection with nature as he tracks the seasons changing and the years turning over Yet Lee s poems also captured war human relationships and distant places informed by his own experiences of lives uprooted by change and conflict Written during the course of his lifetime the verses brought together in Collected Poems range over Lee playing his fiddle in a Spanish town ecstatic in springtime of his beloved Slad valley or digging for faith in the depths of winter Gathered in one volume for the first time and including a generous selection of previously unseen verses from Lee s archives these timeless poignant poems show him expressing the essence of life love and loss

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.Prologo de Susan Hill.

Beginning with Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee writes evocatively of his idyllic childhood in the Cotswolds of the twenties, a world of rich sensuousness and native innocence. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning picks up the story as he leaves his valley for London and then for Spain. There, equipped only with a violin and his wits, he crossed the dramatic landscape of a vibrant and still almost medieval Spain for which he developed an abiding affection. In the winter of 1937 he returned to a country now in the grip of Civil War and joined the International Brigade, describing in A Moment of War his journey into the dark side of Spain with unsparing honesty and poignancy.

A Moment of War is the magnificent conclusion to Laurie Lees autobiographical trilogy begun in Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. It was December 1937 when the young Laurie Lee crossed the Pyrenees and walked into the bitter winter of the Spanish Civil War. With great vividness and poignancy, Lee portrays the brave defeat of youthful idealism in Audens low dishonest decade. Writing in the Literary Review, John Sweeney praised the memoir as, A great, heart-stopping narrative of one young Englishmans part in the war in Spain crafted by a poet, stamping an indelible image of the boredom, random cruelty and stupidity of war