Ronald Blythe

Akenfield: Portrait of an English village

In this rich, rare book  which John Updike called "exquisite" forty-nine men and women a blacksmith and a bellringer to the local vet and a gravedigger speak to us directly, in honest and evocative monologues, of their works and days in the rural country of Suffolk. Composed in the late 1960's, Blythe's volume paints a vivd picture of a community in which the vast changes of the twentieth century are matched by deep continuities of history, tradition, and nature.....