Rural communities
Showing all 15 results
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All the colours of the dark
£9.99All the colours of the dark
Late one summer, the town of Monta Clare is shattered by the abduction of local teenager Joseph ‘Patch’ Macauley. Nobody more so than Saint Brown, who is broken by her best friend’s disappearance. Soon, she will eat, sleep, breathe, only to find him. But when she does: it will break her heart. Patch lies in a pitch-black room – all alone – for days or maybe weeks. Until he feels a hand in his. Her name is Grace and, though they cannot see each other, she takes him from the darkness and paints their world with her words. In this hopeless place, they fall in love. But when he escapes: there is no sign she ever even existed. To find her again, Patch charts an epic search across the country. And, to set him free, Saint will shadow his journey: on a darker path to hunt down the man who took them. Even if finding the truth means losing each other forever.
£9.99 -
Between Britain
£10.99Between Britain
The border between Scotland and England is rich in history. It has been the site of battles, treaties, castles and crossroads. It is also a place where both countries display their nationalism: Saltires flying in the north, the Cross of St George to the south. But it can also be a lens through which to look at the changing history and identities of these two countries. Alistair Moffat is a life-long borderer and the ideal guide on this one-hundred-mile journey. We begin just north of the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Already the battlelines have been drawn – the town having been grabbed by the English from Berwickshire in 1482 and never given back. From here we will head west as our tour travels backwards and forwards through history. In all, we will walk through eight centuries before we reach journey’s end at the mouth of the River Sark.
£10.99 -
Broken country
£16.99Broken country
Everyone in the village said nothing good would come of Gabriel’s return. And as Beth looks at the man she loves on trial for murder, she can’t help think they were right. She was 17 when she’d first met Gabriel. Over that heady, intense summer, he made her think and feel and see differently. She thought it was the start of her great love story and that it would last forever. When Gabriel left to become the person his mother expected him to be, she was broken. It was Frank who picked up the pieces. Together they’d built a home very different from the one she’d imagined with Gabriel. And there was a time – even years – when she was happy. Watching her husband and son riding a tractor across their farm, she remembered feeling so sure that, after everything, this was the life she was supposed to be leading. But then Gabriel came back, and all Beth’s certainty about who she was crumbled.
£16.99 -
Cider With Rosie
£9.99Cider With Rosie
This is a vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belonging to a now distant past.
£9.99 -
Fire control
£6.99Fire control
How often do we hear commanders say they are practically defenceless without machine guns and anti-tank weapons? Yet they have hundreds of men armed with the finest weapon of all – the rifle! For general use there is nothing to take its place. Nothing so universally deadly; nothing to beat it in attack and defence. ‘Fire Control’ is one of a series of training books written in 1942 by Colonel G. A. Wade for the newly-recruited Home Guard. This reproduction from the Royal Armouries’ archive shows how the Second World War trainees learnt to handle their rifles and strategically engage the enemy.
£6.99 -
La vie
£9.99La vie
The Charente: roofs of red terracotta tiles, bleached-white walls, windows shuttered against the blaring sun. The baker does his rounds in his battered little white van with a hundred warm baguettes in the back, while a cat picks its way past a Romanesque church, the sound of bells skipping across miles of rolling, glorious countryside. For many years a farmer in England, John Lewis-Stempel yearned once again to live in a landscape where turtle doves purr and nightingales sing, as they did almost everywhere in his childhood. He wanted to be self-sufficient, to make his own wine and learn the secrets of truffle farming. And so, buying an old honey-coloured limestone house with bright blue shutters, the Lewis-Stempels began their new life as peasant farmers.
£9.99 -
My brilliant career
£16.99My brilliant career
Trapped on her parents’ farm in the Australian outback, ebullient 16-year-old Sybylla Melvyn simultaneously loves bush life and hates the physical burdens it imposes. She longs for a more refined, aesthetic lifestyle – to read, to think, to sing – but most of all she longs to do great things. Suddenly her life is transformed.
£16.99 -
Road blocks
£6.99Road blocks
A road block is a tiny battlefield. Here, all the principles of strategy and tactics apply – just as much as when whole armies meet in the field. It is a challenge thrown down by the free world to Hitler and his hordes. A road block is a gesture of defiance that says, ‘Beyond this, you shall not come’. Lie doggo. Hit hard. And clear out! ‘Road Blocks’ is one of a series of training books written in 1942 by Colonel G.A. Wade for the newly-recruited Home Guard. This reproduction from the Royal Armouries’ archive shows how the Second World War trainees learnt to set up and defend road blocks amidst the threat of enemy invasion.
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Rural
£10.99Rural
‘Eye-opening and persuasive’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘Brilliant ? I loved it’ KIT DE WAAL
‘Thoughtful, moving, honest’ CAL FLYN
£10.99 -
Rural hours
£10.99Rural hours
1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’. ‘Rural Hours’ tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it.
£10.99 -
Sleeping children
£14.99Sleeping children
The acclaimed French debut, now translated into a dozen languages, about the impact of AIDS on one working-class family and on French society. For readers of Ãdouard Louis, Didier Eribon and Douglas Stuart.
£14.99 -
The new rector
£9.99The new rector
When Peter Harris arrives in Turnham Malpas as the new rector, he finds the villagers welcoming but set in their ways. Then a gruesome murder points to a killer in their midst. Peter’s role is crucial but he is wrestling with his own private hell.
£9.99 -
The place of tides
£22.00The place of tides
One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old lady on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on. Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was fierce and otherworldly – and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come quickly: her health was failing. He travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island. Slowly, he began to understand that this woman and her world were not at all what he’d previously thought. What began as a journey of escape became an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge and forgiveness.
£22.00 -
The power and the glory
£25.00The power and the glory
In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham. ‘The Power and the Glory’ explores the country house during this golden age, when Britain ruled over a quarter of the world’s population, when its stately homes were at their most opulent and when, for the privileged few, life in the country house was the best life of all.
£25.00 -
The way of the hermit
£10.99The way of the hermit
A rare insight into an alternative way of life in this unforgettable journey of one man pitting his wits against the wilderness and enduring endless isolation, providing precious insights into the life of a hermit.
£10.99