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  • Published: 15 October 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099285663
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $26.99

Cider With Rosie




The evocative tale of an idyllic childhood in the English countryside.

The classic evocative tale of an idyllic childhood in the English countryside

Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past.

‘Remains as fresh and full of joy and gratitude for youth and its sensations as when it first appeared. It sings in the memory’ Sunday Times

  • Published: 15 October 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099285663
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $26.99

About the author

Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee has written some of the best-loved travel books in the English language. Born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, he was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as he recounted in A Moment of War. In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter. 

Laurie Lee published four collections of poems: The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), My Many-Coated Man (1955) and Pocket Poems (1960). His other works include The Voyage of Magellan (1948), a verse play for radio; A Rose for Winter (1955), which records his travels in Andalusia; The Firstborn (1964); I Can't Stay Long (1975), a collection of his occasional writing; and Two Women (1983). He also wrote three bestselling volumes of autobiography: Cider with Rosie (1959), which has sold over six million copies worldwide, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991), which are also published by Penguin in a single volume entitled Red Sky at Sunrise (1992). He died in May 1997.

Also by Laurie Lee

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Praise for Cider With Rosie

Utterly captivating

Four Shires

A classic of English literature

Good Book Guide

[Laurie Lee] froze a moment in time for us. You don’t forget the language and he is wonderful at detail

Michael Morpurgo, Daily Express

Evocative memoir.

RTE Guide

So convincing and atmospheric… This magical book will captivate you with its richly painted images

Woman's Weekly

Remains as fresh and full of joy and gratitude for youth and its sensations as when it first appeared. It sings in the memory

Sunday Times

It has got a marvellous morning freshness. There is hardly a sentence in it that does not set the sense of touch and smell, as well as sight and hearing, tingling

Daily Mail

One of the great writers of the twentieth century

Independent

An enchanting book, an exquisite farewell, not only to childhood, and boyhood, but also to an England that has vanished

J.B. Priestly

He had a nightingale inside him, a capacity for sensuous, lyrical precision

Guardian

Lee was a poet whose deft passage into prose carried with it much of the rhythm and accuracy of the poet's language

Mignon Khargie, Art Director of Salon

A wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village... I defy anyone to read this and not long for a simpler life, and the carol-singing chapter always gets me in the festive mood. Totally charming

Brighton and Hove Independent