A House in Flanders

Acclaimed as one of the best books of the year when it first appeared, A House in Flanders eloquently evokes the life of a French family one summer in the early 1950s, seen through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old English boy. A comparative stranger when he arrives at the large country house in northern France, he is rapidly drawn into the lives of the colourful aunts, uncles and cousins who people this new world. Portraying a generation whose lives were radically shaped by two world wars, the book is also a study of old age as observed by youth, and of the house and the beautiful countryside which form a tapestry against which the events of that summer and the following spring are played out. Praised by the late Sir Dirk Bogarde as a radiant book...perfect, simple prose at its best, A House in Flanders takes us into an enchanted world now gone forever.