Henry Williamson

A Fox under My Cloak (1954) was the fifth entry in Henry Williamson's 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. 'Williamson's 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

How Dear is Life (1954) was the fourth entry in Henry Williamson's 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. 'Williamson's 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

Young Phillip Maddison (1953) was the third entry in Henry Williamson's 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.'Williamson's 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

Donkey Boy (1952) was the second entry in Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It tells of Richard Maddison's first-born Phillip, nicknamed 'donkey boy' because his life was saved in infancy by being fed with ass's 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.' Spectator 'Williamson's 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 Pathway is the fourth and concluding volume in Henry Williamson's Flax of Dream sequence.Willie Maddison fought in the First World War, and suffered fully its tragedies. Now he returns to his beloved Devon, to the wind-swept Taw estuary, with its swift alternation of sun and rain, its bird-filled saltmarshes and marram-covered sandhills. He comes here to live out, and try to express in writing, insights that have taken shape from his boyhood and wartime experience.The Flax of Dream is a masterpiece. The four novels that comprise it have been reissued in Faber Finds: The Beautiful Years, Dandelion Days, The Dream of Fair Women and The Pathway.

The Dark Lantern (1951) was the first of Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning 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 Williamson's 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 Telegraph 'Williamson's 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

This is the third novel in Henry Williamson's Flax of Dream sequence. Willie Maddison has returned from the Great War and chooses to live a recluse-like existence in a remote Devon cottage; he cares for injured animals and writes. This abruptly changes when Evelyn Fairfax enters his life. Their affair should have been therapeutic, helping to anaesthetize the horrors of war, but complications develop when Willie follows Evelyn back to Folkestone where she has a husband, a young daughter, many besotted admires, and a bad reputation.The four novels comprising the Flax of Dream sequence are: The Beautiful Years, Dandelion Days, The Dream of Fair Women and The Pathway. It has been said, 'together they must be regarded as one of the major works in English fiction of the day . . . in every respect a wonderful achievement.' Faber Finds is proud to be reissuing them.

Dandelion Days is the second novel in The Flax of Dream tetralogy describing the life of Willie Maddison. This volume continues the story of Willie's boyhood with escapades at school and idyllic adventures in the countryside. The moving, at times almost Arcadian account, of youth before the Great War is shattered at the end when we learn 10943 Private W. B. Maddison has enlisted and is serving in a territorial Infantry Battalion in the Ypres Salient.'Gets as near to the heart of a boy as anything I have read for many years. Willie Maddison is a person and a representative. His history is beautiful - and important.' The Observer Faber Finds is reissuing the four titles in The Flax of Dream sequence: The Beautiful Years, Dandelion Days, The Dream of Fair Women and The Pathway.

The Beautiful Years is a tender evocation of West Country childhood in the golden years before the First World War. It is also the first volume in Henry Williamson's tetralogy The Flax of Dream. All four volumes - The Beautiful Years, Dandelion Days, The Dream of Fair Women and The Pathway - are being reissued in Faber Finds, and together they make up the life story of Willie Maddison.The Flax of Dream is one of the major literary achievements of the twentieth century.

The Wet Flanders Plain was first published in 1929 - also the year of, inter alia, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Graves's Goodbye to All That, and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Henry Williamson's 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

In the wild there is no safety. The otter cub 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.

It is early December, 1914, and having survived Ypres and Messines, Phillip Maddison is looking forward to spending Christmas in billets as he knows only too well the reality of life in the trenches. When the order comes instead to move forward, he realizes the old world is lost forever.

This novel of one man's experiences in World War I captures to the full the grim flavour of the ordinary man caught up in a conflict over which he has no control. John Bullock is the archetypal soldier, fighting out of blind patriotism for a cause he does not understand.