Cider With Rosie

She was an artist, a light-giver, and an original, and she never for a moment knew it. Laurie Lees deft but sublime summarisation of his mother tells you all you need to know about one of the great masters of our language.

Lees account of his early childhood in a small, backwater country village in the Cotswolds is a classic memoir of times past already on the wane and now gone beyond memory. This is a place of bare feet, untrammelled woods and quiet lanes untroubled by cars.

Well-known and equally well-loved, echoes of Cider with Rosie exist everywhere from the cornflower skies in Grahame Swifts Waterland and H.E. Bates lusty, rustic Larkin books to adverts for Hovis bread. In some ways, Cider with Rosie is one of those books at risk of invisibility through sheer, apparent familiarity, but this month we invite you to drink deep from a fine work you always promised yourself youd read.

Part-memoir, part-sharp-sided polemic that is potentially darker than the bucolic idyll you might imagine, this is a work that continues to stand as one of the great novels of the last century.

Happily, the book has grown during its long intervals: not only between Lees post- first-world-war childhood and his writing about it in the late 1950s, but between both those times and now. - Jeremy Treglown, The Spectator