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I love these little books, and go back to them every couple of years to read them straight through. Alice Thomas Ellis has a talent for bringing you right into her messy, disorganized, loving, crowded home, and makes you part of the family in a very no-nonsense, unsentimental way.
She can have you laughing out loud at the beginning of a sentence, only to bring you up short by the end of it (for example, a casual reference to "visiting her son's grave" when she has a boisterous family of adolescents at home, and you've had no previous warning that she'd lost one).
If one disorganized home (in London's Camden Town section) were not enough, she has another in the countryside in Wales, where it rains so constantly the sheep appear to her to show more be suicidal.
These pieces are delightful to read and reread. show less
She can have you laughing out loud at the beginning of a sentence, only to bring you up short by the end of it (for example, a casual reference to "visiting her son's grave" when she has a boisterous family of adolescents at home, and you've had no previous warning that she'd lost one).
If one disorganized home (in London's Camden Town section) were not enough, she has another in the countryside in Wales, where it rains so constantly the sheep appear to her to show more be suicidal.
These pieces are delightful to read and reread. show less
On the whole I enjoyed all four books, but not being British I didn't understand many of the "punchlines", and reading all four in a row makes the essays seem a little repetitous (but maybe it did rain for four consecutive years in Wales)
Lori has this her library ...
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31+ Works 2,021 Members
Alice Thomas Ellis (also writes as Anna Margaret Haycraft), is a novelist and columnist. She was born in Liverpool, England in 1932. She attended Bangor Grammar School and the Liverpool School of Art. Ellis wrote a weekly column for the Spectator from 1985 to 1989 and for the Catholic Herald from 1990 to 1996. She co-wrote two books on juvenile show more delinquency with psychiatrist Tom Pitt-Atkins. Ellis also wrote A Welsh Childhood, a book recounting the history of Wales and featuring the photographs of Patrick Sutherland. Ellis has written several novels beginning with The Sin Eater in 1977. The novel won the Welsh Arts Council Award. Other novels include Unexplained Laughter which won the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year in 1985 and The Inn at the End of the World which was the winner of the Writer's Guild Award for Best Fiction in 1991. Another novel, The 27th Kingdom, received a Booker Prize Nomination in 1982. She was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature from 1999 until her death in 2005, due to lung cancer. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Biography & Memoir, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 828.91409 — Literature & rhetoric English & Old English literatures English miscellaneous writings English miscellaneous writings 1900- English miscellaneous writings 1900-1999 English miscellaneous writings 1945-1999 Individual authors
- LCC
- PR6055 .L4856 .H66 — Language and Literature English English Literature 1961-2000
Statistics
- Members
- 67
- Popularity
- 458,328
- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (4.09)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook
- ISBNs
- 6
