Cider With Rosie

Books

This international-bestselling memoir of childhood in post-World War I rural England is one of the most "remarkable" portraits of youth in all literature (The New York Times). Three years old and wrapped in a Union Jack to protect him from the sun, Laurie Lee arrived in the village of Slad in the final summer of the First World War. The cottage his mother had rented for three and sixpence a week had neither running water nor electricity, but it was surrounded by a lovely half-acre garden and, most importantly, it was big enough for the seven children in her care. It was here, in a verdant valley tucked into the rolling hills of the Cotswolds, that Laurie Lee learned to look at life with a painter's eye and a poet's heart-qualities of vision that, decades later, would make him one of England's most cherished authors. In this vivid recollection of a magical time and place, water falls from the scullery pump "sparkling like liquid sky." Autumn is more than a season-it is a land eternally aflame, like Moses's ...