Notwithstanding: Stories from an English Village - Tapa dura

Críticas

A timely examination of the charming and, at time, heart-wrenchingly sad aspects of English village life...testament to the rude health of the author's own imagination. (Adam O’riordan Financial Times)

The stories are sketches of lives that settle into the atmosphere of a place and make it unique. (Kate Saunders The Times)

Delightful collection...exquisitely told. (Clare Colvin Daily Mail)

Reseña del editor

A Frenchman once pointed out to Louis de Bernières that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe, adding that it was 'an immense lunatic asylum'. Casting his mind back to the village in southern Surrey where he grew up in the sixties and seventies, but plagued by a novelist's inability to stick to the truth, Louis de Bernières brings us in Notwithstanding stories of a vanished England which will delight readers of his much-loved novels.

The English village was a place where a lady might dress as a man in plus fours and spend her time shooting squirrels with a twelve bore, or keep a vast menagerie in her house. A retired general might give up wearing clothes, a spiritualist might live in a cottage with her sister and the ghost of her husband, and people might think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed.

De Bernières' characters roam through the book, appearing in each other's stories and painting a picture of an entire community. Here we find the atmosphere of those times as it was in the countryside. Notwithstanding is not about an imagined idyll; it is about people who are worth remembering, whose lives are worth celebrating, and who would otherwise have been forgotten.