Akenfield Portrait of an English Village [Paperback]

Woven from the words of the inhabitants of a small Suffolk village in the 1960s,Akenfieldis a masterpiece of twentieth-century English literature, a scrupulously observed and deeply affecting portrait of a place and people and a now vanished way of life. Ronald Blythe’s wonderful book raises enduring questions about the relations between memory and modernity, nature and human nature, silence and speech. Ronald Blythe conducted the fifty-odd oral histories that make up his portrait of a (renamed) village in rural Suffolk with an exceptionally sharp eye for poignant situations and an equally fine ear for telling phrases. Every one of his interviews is a compact drama of identity—often riveting in itself, and always contributing to an idea of community that is at once coherent and varied. —Andrew Motion,The New York Review of Books

“Ronald Blythe lovingly draws apart the curtains of legend and landscape, revealing the inner, almost clandestine, spirit of the village behind. His book consists of a series of direct-speech monologues, delivered by forty-nine Suffolk residents, and interpretatively linked by the author. The effect is one of astonishing immediacy: it is as if those country people have looked up for a moment from their plow, lawnmower or kitchen sink, and are talking directly (and disturbingly frankly) to the reader. This is a brilliant and extraordinary book which raises disquieting second thoughts when the poetry has faded—as Mr. Blythe says, it is like a ‘strange journey through a familiar land.’” —Jan Morris,The New York Times Book Review

“A hundred years from now, anyone wanting to know how things were on the land will turn more profitably toAkenfieldthan to a sheaf of anaemically professional social surveys.” 
—The Guardian

“For all its quiet and subtlety,Akenfielddocuments the disappearance of l³~