A Solitary War

Volume thirteen of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. In September 1939, war with Germany casts its long shadow over the town and countryside. Phillip Maddison, now farming in East Anglia, still stubbornly believes that Hitler's chief aim is the defence of Europe against Stalin; but he is engaged in a personal war on the 'bad lands' where his farm is situated, trying to subdue mounting debts and to create a fertile yeoman holding for his family. The portrayal of his struggles, both with himself and with the land, carry total conviction, as does the picture of his life in England until the ending of the Battle of Britain. 'This astonishing sequence. It is a major mark he is making on the modern novel.' Daily Express

Henry Williamson (1895-1977) was a prolific writer best known for Tarka the Otter which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream tetralogy and the fifteen volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds. His politics were unfortunate, naively and misguidedly right-wing. In truth, he was a Romantic. The critic George Painter famously said of him, 'He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic.'