August - Tapa blanda

"A striking and impressive work...one of the most original novels of the year" (Observer)

"Simply one of the finest books about the pains and joys of family that I have ever read. The life of the Jones family glows like a barley-sugar window" (Time Out)

"A brilliantly written first novel... Spirit of time and place is lovingly remembered, steeped in nostalgia yet never sentimental... This is a novelist at work, glorifying in the old-fashioned virtues of plot and character...rendered in graceful prose that is beguiling and charming" (Mail on Sunday)

"Full of enjoyably acute social observation, August offers an absorbing account of a now vanished era of English life... Beguiling" (The Times)

"Gerard Woodward's first novel is founded on the brilliantly simple premise of portraying a family and its inexorable implosion through a succession of August camping holidays... A strong narrative, powered by cunningly withheld information and the threat of crisis" (Independent)

Ever since Aldous Jones careened over the handlebars of his bicycle in 1955 and landed next to Farmer Evans's first field, it has become a tradition for him to take his family camping in Wales. Aldous has started to feel that a certain symbiosis has developed between their North London home and the Welsh village that they only ever see in August. As the years pass, Aldous's family idyll starts to disintegrate and the farm becomes a place drenched in memory.