Customer Reviews
Be transported through time and space! - By: Patience, 25 Jul 2008 
I love this book. Our headmaster often used to read passages from itin morning assemley decades ago, & it stayed with me since then. The language is beautifully eloquent, & the author gives us a wonderfully realistic look into country life all that time ago. I especially loved the chapter about his mother, describing her with such honesty but love too, that I felt I'd known her myself. This weekend read was better than a weekend breakin the country !
Eloquent - By: kehs, 20 Apr 2008 This is a wonderfully told memoir of Lee's childhoodin the remote Cotswold village of Stroud. He tells of how he grew up being raisedin a one-parent family, his father having left them when he was just 3 years old. His mother believed for all of her life that one day her husband would return home to them, but sadly he never did. He used to send them a few pounds to support the home each week but Lee's life was one of poverty & hardship, yet he still took delightin many of the simple thingsin life. Lee's style of writing is beautifully descriptive & depicts a world before technology such as mobile phones & computers were even imagined. Sometimes funny, often sad, but extremely eloquently told,in this book Laurie Lee brings the distant past back to life & I highly recommend it.
A sort of cross between a novel and a biographical prose poem - By: Lou Knee, 30 Mar 2008 
This very richly written descriptive of a childhood so fondly remembered is a piece of pure writing, straight from the heart, & rightly stands as a classic. It is of course a thing of a type, & this type of work helps to show how hugely wide the category of 'novel' writing is. This is a work straddling the far border of fiction & factual based biography but written for the enjoyment of description & depiction by a lover of language. It's worth a read by anyone whatever they're tastes, but I expect not too many thriller readers will be drawn to reading it. I liked it because it's clearly written by a lover of both life & language, but did find it a very rich cake. I can actually see why some would dislike it as a novel. Those who pick up a novel wanting to be told a story, rather than simply be taken to another world, may well feel cheated by it. It is without doubt though beautifully written.
Brilliant - By: booksdingle, 20 Jan 2008 I love this book esp the illustrated version, the writing is so rich & conjures up vivid images that jump straight off the page. read itin school & enjoyed it read it again as an adult & still enjoyed it. I would read it again, which is very unusual for me. Classic
Long ago and far away - By: Bob Sherunkle, 23 Aug 2007 "They said: `You're Laurie Lee, aren't you? Well just you sit there for the present.' I sat there all day but I never got it. I ain't going back there again." This is Laurie Lee's unforgettable description of his first day at school.
I have a special affection for this book, as my mother grew upin the Stroud area & was only two years younger than Laurie. Even if they didn't actually know each other, it is very likely that they met.
The story manages to be both lyrical & realistic. One minute it presents a childhood idyll, next you are faced with death - sometimes sad, sometimes brutal.
The core of the story is the life of Laurie's large & boisterous family, livingin cheerful povertyin their Cotswold cottage, & above all his mercurial, warm-hearted mother (his father plays only a bit-partin events). "She was an artist, a light-giver, & an original, & she never for a moment knew it."
It is a common tendency to look back on the period of one's youth as a turning pointin history, but when you read the last chapter you will understand Laurie's claim "The village had a few years left, the last of its thousand, & they passed almost without our knowing".
Rosie really did exist. Indeed, she outlived Laurie, & only three years ago she was interviewed by BBC Radio Gloucestershire.
There have been two excellent TV adaptations of the story. Unfortunately neither is currently available on DVD. (Correction August 2008 - the more recent version starring Juliet Stevenson is now available.)
The book is as golden as the cider of the title - read it & delight.
