Pocket Classics: Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight

3 total works

Solitary War

by Henry Williamson

Published September 1966

Phillip feels very much alone, struggling to make a living for his family from his Norfolk farm. When a friend suggests a trial business partnership, he accepts, sending Lucy and the younger children to live with her brother. All the while he longs to write a novel on the age in which he is living.

The Gale of the World

by Henry Williamson

Published 22 July 1999

The final volume, volume fifteen, of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Phillip Maddison is living apart from his wife, Lucy, in the year immediately following the Second World War. He has sold his farm and handed over the proceeds in trust for the family excluding himself. Now living alone on Exmoor he is as ever haunted by the past, and his pro-German views bring him under constant fear of attack. A love affair, the death of his father, and tender relationship with his cousin's two daughters are particularly outstanding in a novel full of incident; and this final novel in A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight completes the history of Phillip Maddison while at the same time rounding off an unsurpassed picture of fifty swiftly-changing years.

Lucifer Before Sunrise

by Henry Williamson

Published October 1967

Volume fourteen of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Beginning in the winter of 1940/1 and ending with the uneasy 'sunrise' of peace in 1945, this volume sees Phillip Maddison striving idealistically to hold a balance while lamenting the division and possible total ruin of Europe, as he copes with the day-to-day problems of running the East Anglian farm he has wrested from virtual wilderness. The pattern of everyday living in those years is lovingly evoked: the bomber-haunted nights, the petty profiteering and gossip of country life - all essential, but often unrecorded, elements of the wartime scene.

'The sequence will stand, at the end, as a massive emotional record.' Guardian