A Frenchman once pointed out to Louis de Bernieres that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe, adding that it was 'an immense lunatic asylum'. Casting his mind back to the village in southern Surrey where he grew up in the sixties and seventies, but plagued by a novelist's inability to stick to the truth, Louis de Bernieres brings us in "Notwithstanding" stories of a vanished England which will delight readers of his much-loved novels. The English village was a place where a lady might dress as a man in plus fours and spend her time shooting squirrels with a twelve bore, or keep a vast menagerie in her house. A retired general might give up wearing clothes, a spiritualist might live in a cottage with her sister and the ghost of her husband, and people might think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed. De Bernieres' characters roam through the book, appearing in each other's stories and painting a picture of an entire community. Here we find the atmosphere of those times as it was in the countryside.
"Notwithstanding" is not about an imagined idyll; it is about people who are worth remembering, whose lives are worth celebrating, and who would otherwise have been forgotten.
- ISBN13 9781846553301
- Publish Date 1 October 2009
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 21 January 2013
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Harvill Secker
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 288
- Language English