Edition:
Paperback
ISBN:
9780571271085
Published:
17.06.2010
No of pages:
400
Donkey Boy
Henry Williamson
The second volume of
A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight
,
Donkey Boy
is the story of Richard Maddison's first-born Phillip, nicknamed 'donkey boy' because his life was saved as a baby by being fed with ass's milk. Set at the end of the nineteenth-century and beginning of the twentieth-century, it describes the young boy, something of a misfit, growing up at odds with his father in the opening years of the Edwardian era. The whole tone and feel of a vanished age are marvellously brought to life.
A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight
is an epic comprising fifteen volumes. Although it should be much better known, it has attracted high praise most especially from George D. Painter (the biographer of Proust) and John Middleton Muury.
'Here is an unrolling map of the labyrinth of three generations, our fathers, ourselves and our children, and the thread leading to the mystery - monster or divinity? - at the centre. In my belief ... the whole cycle will ultimately be recognized as the great historical novel of our time, its subject as the total experience of twentieth-century man.' George D. Painter
'This will be in its entirety one of the most remarkable English novels of our time ... It is amazingly rich in all the living detail of a swiftly changing society; the characters are drawn with such loving sympathy and such firmness of imaginative outline that we are entirely absorbed by their vicissitudes. We are apprehensive for them, we are relieved; we rejoice and are sorrowful; we are angry and we understand and we laugh and laugh again. To be able to do this with us is the novelist's supreme gift ... I believe it is high time we awoke to the splendour and scope of his effort and achievement in
A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight
. Begin with the
Dark Lantern
and read on; you will be the richer for it.' John Middleton Murry
The entire fifteen volume sequence is being reissued in Faber Finds.
Tags
Categorised as:
Fiction
Sub-categories:
General Fiction
Genres & Themes:
Faber Finds;
Bildungsroman;
Edwardian;
Outsiders
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The fourth volume of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight , How Dear is Life follows the story of Phillip Maddison in the portentous months leading to ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
The Beautiful Years
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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 ...
Pilcrow
Adam Mars-Jones
‘I’m not sure that I can claim to have taken my place in the human alphabet, even as its honorary twenty-seventh letter. I’m ...
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