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Loading... Red Sky at Sunriseby Laurie Lee
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Belongs to SeriesLaurie Lee's Autobiographies (omnibus 1-3)
A beautiful new edition of Laurie Lee's celebrated autobiographical trilogy- Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morningand A Moment of War 'I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.' 'This trilogy is a sequence of early recollections, beginning with the dazzling lights and sounds of my first footings on earth in a steep Cotswold valley some three miles long. For nineteen years this was the limit of my world, then one midsummer morning I left home and walked to London and down the blazing length of Spain during the innocent days of the early thirties. Never had I felt so fat with time, so free to go where I would. Then such indulgence was suddenly broken by the savage outbreak of the Civil War . . .' - Laurie Lee No library descriptions found. |
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Cider with Rosie is not just one of the best books ever written about childhood, it is (for me) one of the best books ever written.
As I Walked Out Midsummer Morning sees Lee's leave-taking of his village home in the Cotswold countryside and his entry into the bigger world. It's a transition from a rural lifestyle that had not significantly changed for hundreds of years to the modern twentieth-century urban environment. Having seen the big city, Lee wants to see more of the world, and we are therefore gifted with his wondrously brilliant sketch of Spain. The heat and light of the Spanish plains seems to pour off the page and you feel transported.
A Moment of War continues from the point the previous volume ended, but the tone is very different. In an unusually cold Spanish winter, Lee joins the International Brigade in the Republican struggle against General Franco's fascists. Lee shows the horrible futility, wastefulness and arbitrariness of war unflinchingly. This easily stands beside [b:Goodbye to All That|3161267|Goodbye to All That|Robert Graves|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1360205734s/3161267.jpg|1701023] by [a:Robert Graves|3012988|Robert Graves|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1251049332p2/3012988.jpg] as a great literary war memoir. A downbeat ending to the trilogy, but nonetheless affecting. ( )