I am here to recommend books. I hope I’ll be recommending a lot of novels, things you can take to your book club or on holiday or read on your commute. Respectable fiction! I do read that. But also, get ready for cookbooks, non-fiction, cod-regency pornography, middle-grade monster franchises, barely-published rural memoirs from the 1920s, really really niche stuff. I just like being a fan of things! If I explain those things to you maybe you will become fans of them too.
I promise you two things:
1: I won’t recommend books I work on, and this is out of Boundaries and fear of fucking up, to be honest. Please know that the books I work on are literally the best books that have ever been made and that they are the things I am the biggest fan of of all. Buy them when they come out and read and love them because it is genuinely true that the writers I work with make the best books ever.
2: I really won’t recommend things I don’t think are absolutely banging, for one reason or another. I don’t read The Latest Releases unless I do so it’ll just be stuff I liked when I read it.
But let’s start as we mean to go on yes? With Lark Rise, by Flora Thompson. Let’s start at the rural memoirs. There is a 2008 TV show called Lark Rise to Candleford which seems to go on and on, absolutely hours of the stuff, but isn’t at all like the books, so please set that aside.
Flora Thompson was a self-taught writer, the daughter of a stonemason and a nursemaid, and Lark Rise (and the two sequels, Over To Candleford and Candleford Green) are accounts of her country childhood in the 1880s. Simple! A tonic. Growing up in a little hamlet, playing games on the village green, how girls went from a village to service and back to raising too many children in poverty. Cordials etc.
When I was a kid in the 80s we had the illustrated abridged version which was very floral and ribbony and entered my little absorbent brain and stayed there, a sort of Laura Ashley 1980s version of the 1920s version of the 1880s, about which I now feel nostalgic. Is that clear? I think quite a lot of our unconscious imaginings about country childhood are shaped by Lark Rise whether we know it or not. ANYWAY, when I picked it up this year I was struck not just by all the maypoles and the shawls but by how political it is. It’s a portrait of a generation caught between the enclosures act and public benefits. I sort of can’t believe that I thought it was all kids dawdling on country lanes but there we are. I love it more now.
The writer Nicola Chester has written this lovely essay about it, and about her affinity with Flora Thompson, if you want to read more. Nowadays you can buy Lark Rise second hand or Slightly Foxed have done a lovely little expensive version. It’s a great thing to read when you’ve crawled to the end of the day imo. Lots of love! dxx