Showing results for "Village Life" in Biographies & Memoirs

Tom Fort made his name as a writer with his bestselling travel narrative The A303: Highway to the Sun. He now focuses on matters closer to home by celebrating a quintessential cornerstone of any village in Britain - the shop - in this case a century-old hardware shop daughter-in-law bought eighteen months before the pandemic struck the UK to run herself in their beautiful Berkshire village, outside of Reading. The family's dream of developing the shop into one that would become the centre of village life certainly did come true, but for a very different set of circumstances.

Former townies Giles and Mary swapped city life for rural Wiltshire over thirty years ago, and they've each embraced it in their own very different ways. Mary has happily traded sophisticated London salons for monthly lectures at the Farmers' Club, competitive school quizzes, church interactions and local Auction House sales. While Giles has immersed himself in the catastrophic consequences of conventional farming, his organic no-dig veg-patch, the increasingly disproportionate response by local landlords to harmless trespassers and the strange death of the village house martins.

Adam Henson has spent his whole life on Bemborough farm - over 50 winters and Christmases. During that time, the troughs have frozen over, snow has fallen so thickly riding shire horses out to the fields has been the only option, puppies have been found under the Christmas tree - and crises out in the world have almost brought the farm to a close. Christmas for a farmer takes a different shape to everyone else's, because the animals always have to come first. So settle down to hear the tales that have defined festivity for the Henson family.

Eyes on the Street is a revelation of the phenomenal woman who raised three children, wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged at home and on the streets in thousands of debates - all of which she won. Here is the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the journalist who honed her writing skills at Iron Age, Architectural Forum, Fortune, and other outlets.

"Coleshanger people are pretty bad," said Uncle Edward. "They won't cross water after sunset. And they have to be in bed by midnight, otherwise they think that they'll be turned into baboons and apes. They also worship the flea." Written in 1952, Coleshanger is a humorous, whimsical, and charming recount of English village life in the early part of the last century, a tale waiting 70 years to be heard but still very much the story of us today.

Tales of the Autistic Village Cricketer is the neurologically "different" slant of eye-opening, blunt, and frankly, funny collection of completely true memoirs that have happened in my cricketing life. Starting from 2003, it initially outlines myself as a young cricketer, and how autism affected my participation, often with chuckle-inducing results!