Barefoot at the lake

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Robert Olmstead

Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the laconic, rough-hewn farmers, loggers, and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. In Stay Here with Me he draws directly from his own experience as he journeys back to his youth on his grandfather's dairy farm in New Hampshire to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him. Authentic, intimate, and intense, Stay Here with Me is about coming of age and leaving home, about the acts of rebellion that free the body even as they bind the soul to a place forever. Olmstead lays bare the acute pain of his father's alcoholism and the shattering decline of his grandfather, the family patriarch. With delicate sensuality, he traces the flowering of his love for a woman who "walks like light would walk if it could." And throughout, there is the land where his family has worked and lived and died for six generations, land at once richly abundant and cruelly demanding.

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Anna Birch and Deborah Crewe

"When fresh-faced, newly qualified vet Anna arrives in the seemingly sleepy Dorset village of Ebbourne, little does she know that this tiny rural community is about to change her life. Straight in at the deep end, Anna faces two tricky calvings, an emergency call-out to a frightened mare, lots of mad cats and one enormous dog with an injured leg."--Publisher's description.

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Xandra Bingley

A lyrical, evocative and wonderfully original wartime memoir about life on a farm in the Cotswolds, seen through the eyes of a child. Bertie, May & Mrs Fish is Xandra Bingley's account of her childhood on a Cotswold farm, set against the backdrop of the Second World War and its aftermath. Bingley's mother is left to farm the land while her husband is away at war. With its eccentric cast of characters, this book captures both the essence of a country childhood and the remarkable courage and resilience displayed by ordinary people during the war. The beauty and sensitivity of Bingley's observation is artfully balanced by the harshness and grit of her reality. Bingley tells her tale in a startling voice which captures the universe of a child, the unforgiving landscape and the complicated adult world surrounding her. Her acute observation and her emotional, sensual descriptive gift for place, people, sound and touch make this a brilliantly authentic and evocative portrait.

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Peter Wicks

Peter Wicks dedicates the third instalment of his memoirs to his father Frank Wicks who fought in the trenches of the First World War. Now in his teens Peter receives his own conscription papers, destined to become a military policeman. During his training he learns to drive and discovers that bullies are found in all walks of life.