Love and the Loveless: A Soldier's Tale
By (Author) Henry Williamson
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
20th January 2011
Main
United Kingdom
Paperback
384
Width 126mm, Height 198mm, Spine 28mm
404g
The year covered by this novel was perhaps the darkest of the Great War, with widespread mutinies in the French Army after the distasterous Nivelle offensive in Champagne in the spring of 1917. Volume seven of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight sees Phillip Maddison now a young transport officer, tending his 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 nevertheless 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. Faber Finds is reissuing the entire fifteen volumes of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight.
Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was a prolific writer best-known for Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream tetralogy and the fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds. famously said of him, 'He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic'.