HENRY WILLIAMSON

With a new Introduction by Jeremy Gavron ''The supreme writer of the English countryside'' Christopher Somerville, Daily Telegraph In the wild there is no safety. The otter club Tarka grows up with his mother and sisters, learning to swim, catch fish and to fear the cry of the hunter and the flash of the metal trap. Soon he must fend for himself, travelling through rivers, woods, moors, ponds and out to sea, sometimes with the female otters White-tip and Greymuzzle, always on the run. Eventually, chased by a pack of hounds, he meets his nemesis, the fearsome dog Deadlock, and must fight for his life. Tarka the Otter depicts a fierce struggle for survival in the wild that also carries echoes of the author''s experiences of the First World War. The result of years spent observing otters in north Devon, it is a celebration of life, the eternal rhythms of nature and the English countryside.

The Wet Flanders Plain was first published in 1929 - also the year of, inter alia, Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front, Gravess Goodbye to All That, and Hemingways A Farewell to Arms. Henry Williamsons book stands alongside those works as a classic of the Great War. In 1928 Williamson revisited the battlefields of Flanders and Northern France in the company of a fellow veteran. He wanted to return to my old comrades... to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders - to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands of the Somme - for I am dead with them, and they live in me again. He hoped to rid himself of the wraiths of the war. Whether or not he succeeded, he produced an unforgettable testament.The Wet Flanders Plain emerges from the mass of War books as the most beautiful and the most terrible.Outlook

Ci sono libri che al di la della storia o del contenuto che narrano, lasciano un segno. Sono tanti i casi e lo sono in modi e tempi diversi. Molti di questi non hanno nemmeno un riferimento storico o generazionale, perche sono sempre attuali. Tarka la lontra e uno di questi. Grazie alla sua lettura, e possibile riconciliarsi con il mondo naturale, farsi rapire dalle infinite relazioni che esistono tra milioni di creature, vivere la complessita e la bellezza della vita selvatica. Per molti di noi sono stati libri formativi e continuano ad esserlo. Se poi tra quel noi, selezioniamo chi fin da giovane ha avuto unattrazione particolare per la lontra, lo si deve soprattutto ad autori come Henry Williamson e Gavin Maxwell, lautore dellAnello di acque lucenti e della Baia degli ontani.

A Fox under My Cloak (1954) was the fifth entry in Henry Williamsons fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It follows Phillip Maddison into the Great War, surviving in the face of terror, from the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 to the gas attacks of the Battle of Loos the following year. While home in England on sick leave Phillip obtains his commission into a fashionable regiment in which his social inadequacies make him the butt of his fellow officers scorn. Yet, alone among them, Phillip has tasted the bleak reality of life, and death, on the Western Front. Williamsons style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising. Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

Love and the Loveless (1958) was the seventh entry in Henry Williamsons fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. The year covered by this novel, 1917, was perhaps the darkest of the Great War, with widespread mutinies in the French Army after the disastrous Nivelle offensive. Phillip Maddison is now a young transport officer, tending pack animals, surviving amid devastation and death. His courage, sustained by poetry, by comradeship, by the comfort of whisky and water, is perhaps unnatural; but amid the charnel house of battle he endures, in a way of life so alien to those at home that it might be the dark side of the moon. Williamsons style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising. Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

Volume fourteen of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Beginning in the winter of 1940/1 and ending with the uneasy sunrise of peace in 1945, this volume sees Phillip Maddison striving idealistically to hold a balance while lamenting the division and possible total ruin of Europe, as he copes with the day-to-day problems of running the East Anglian farm he has wrested from virtual wilderness. The pattern of everyday living in those years is lovingly evoked: the bomber-haunted nights, the petty profiteering and gossip of country life - all essential, but often unrecorded, elements of the wartime scene.The sequence will stand, at the end, as a massive emotional record.Guardian

The Dark Lantern (1951) was the first of Henry Williamsons fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlightspanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. In it we meet Richard Maddison, a countryman working in London as a City clerk, struggling to make do on a few shillings a week. He falls for Hetty Turner, youngest daughter of a prosperous merchant, but her father rates Richard an unsuitable suitor.There is magic in Henry Williamsons novel . . . which raises it right out of the family saga class. The magic is of the steam train age of South London which is so lovingly described. John Betjeman, Daily TelegraphWilliamsons style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising. Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

The final volume, volume fifteen, of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Phillip Maddison is living apart from his wife, Lucy, in the year immediately following the Second World War. He has sold his farm and handed over the proceeds in trust for the family excluding himself. Now living alone on Exmoor he is as ever haunted by the past, and his pro-German views bring him under constant fear of attack. A love affair, the death of his father, and tender relationship with his cousins two daughters are particularly outstanding in a novel full of incident; and this final novel in A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight completes the history of Phillip Maddison while at the same time rounding off an unsurpassed picture of fifty swiftly-changing years.

Donkey Boy (1952) was the second entry in Henry Williamsons fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlightspanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It tells of Richard Maddisons first-born Phillip, nicknamed donkey boy because his life was saved in infancy by being fed with asss milk. The boy grows up in the Edwardian era, something of a misfit, at odds with his father. With extraordinary skill and precision [Williamson] rebuilds the scenery of the past... [he] seems to be engaged in a thriller whose instalments can be relied on to animate a whole section of social history.SpectatorWilliamsons style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising. Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

The Innocent Moon (1961) was the ninth volume in Henry Williamsons great roman-fleuve,A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. It is the early 1920s and Phillip Maddison, out of the army, is determined to become a writer. When his career as a journalist founders, he retires to Devon on his motorcycle to share a cottage with a friend and devote himself to his work. But this arrangement does not succeed and before long Phillip finds himself alone. Meanwhile, his heart is assailed by what he takes for love - but not until he has shed certain illusions does he discover what he seeks, from a source that is least expected. Set against the London literary world as well as the superbly drawn Devon landscape, The Innocent Moon paints an unforgettable picture of its times.

The Golden Virgin (1957) was the sixth entry in Henry Williamsons fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. Its action unfolds in 1916, the year of the Somme. As war destroys the countryside Phillip Maddison loves, turning it into an inferno of mud and terror, the damaged figure of the Mother of God with her Babe on a ruined church inspires the legend that war will end only when she, the Golden Virgin, topples into the ruins below. Invalided home once again Phillip re-crosses the narrow waters of the Channel to find life continuing as before, albeit with an ever-widening gulf between those at home and those who have returned.Williamsons style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising. Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

A Test to Destruction (1960) was the eighth entry in Henry Williamsons fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It begins in the final year of the Great War. After the harsh winter of 1917 everyone is nearing the limits of their endurance. Hetty, temporarily relieved to have Phillip safely home, hopes desperately that her son will not be posted to France again. Phillip, however, is determined to go back, and adds his name to a list of those available for service. After returning to the Front, however, he is injured and sent on convalescent leave in the West Country, where his post-war civilian life begins.Williamsons style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising. Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

Volume twelve of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. In this novel of the troubled and decadent years before the Second World War, Phillip Maddison sees the survivors of the Western Front as a phoenix generation impelled to reject the past in order to make a country fit for heroes. Yet he remains aloof from any direct action, preferring to plan his own history of the Great War and its aftermath while becoming deeply involved in his own problems. Looking meanwhile over the international scene, as the storm clouds of war gather inexorably, the Faust-like figure of Hitler is preaching the advent of a new Europe, based on a thousand years of peace.He commands, and is able to turn to artistic ends, a powerful and mournful sense of the near past which has shaped and distorted us into what we are. Normal Shrapnel, Guardian

Young Phillip Maddison (1953) was the third entry in Henry Williamsons fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It carries forward the story of Phillip as he grows towards manhood in the years immediately preceding the Great War. Unpredictable and wayward, Phillip nevertheless possesses a keen love of nature, which he indulges as best he can in the nearby countryside. But as his schooldays draw to a close he seems destined to follow his father by working in the Moon Fire Office, in the smoky heart of the greatest metropolis the world has ever seen.Williamsons style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising. Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

Volume thirteen of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. In September 1939, war with Germany casts its long shadow over the town and countryside. Phillip Maddison, now farming in East Anglia, still stubbornly believes that Hitlers chief aim is the defence of Europe against Stalin; but he is engaged in a personal war on the bad lands where his farm is situated, trying to subdue mounting debts and to create a fertile yeoman holding for his family. The portrayal of his struggles, both with himself and with the land, carry total conviction, as does the picture of his life in England until the ending of the Battle of Britain.This astonishing sequence. It is a major mark he is making on the modern novel.Daily Express

It Was the Nightingale (1962) was the tenth volume of Williamsons great roman-fleuve, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. After only a year of married happiness, Phillip Maddison experiences tragedy when his young wife Barley dies in childbirth. Left with a baby son, a cat, a dog and an otter cub he and Barley rescued while on holiday in France, Phillip endures the deepest grief. When the otter goes missing Phillip dedicates his life to searching for her, in the hope that success might grant him a new start in life.At times almost unbearably poignant... In It Was the Nightingale Maddison enters a world with which Williamson, on the strength of the remarkable Tarka the Otter, will always be associated. Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939

Volume eleven of The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Twelve hundred acres of downland valley with a trout stream await an heir and Sir Hilary Maddison wants his only nephew Phillip to learn farming the hard way, beginning as a labourer and rising to a tenancy-for-life. But Phillip has other ideas. Unable to forget the early death of his wife Barley as well as his friends who died in the Great War, he needs to recreate his past in his writing. Trying to combine both worlds Phillip is bound to fail in one of them; and literary success only intensifies the dilemma. The finest yet in Mr Williamsons long series Kenneth Allsop

How Dear is Life (1954) was the fourth entry in Henry Williamsons fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It finds Phillip Maddison in the portentous months leading to the outbreak of war in 1914.Now a clerk in the Moon Fire Office, Phillip decides to join the territorials - attracted by the money, the camp near the sea, and the prospect of a new suit of clothes. As a glorious summer slips away war seems unreal; but the old world is in peril, and before long the British Expeditionary Force is setting sail for France.Williamsons style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising. Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939

Compilación de fotografías realizadas durante la guerra civil en diferentes puntos de la geografía española.