It Was the Nightingale

It Was the Nightingale (1962) was the tenth volume of Williamson's great roman-fleuve, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. After only a year of married happiness, Phillip Maddison experiences tragedy when his young wife Barley dies in childbirth. Left with a baby son, a cat, a dog and an otter cub he and Barley rescued while on holiday in France, Phillip endures the deepest grief. When the otter goes missing Phillip dedicates his life to searching for her, in the hope that success might grant him a new start in life. 'At times almost unbearably poignant... In It Was the Nightingale Maddison enters a world with which Williamson, on the strength of the remarkable Tarka the Otter, will always be associated.' Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939

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.'