Wild Olives
  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409046295
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

Wild Olives

Life in Majorca With Robert Graves

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Sep 2010
Paperback
15 Aug 2001
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William Graves’ memoir about growing up with a famous father and living in Majorca through the middle of the twentieth century.

In 1944, at the age of five, William Graves was taken from England to the delightful mountain village of Deya in Majorca, where his father - the poet Robert Graves - had returned with his new family to the place he had lived with Laura Riding before the war.

Young William grew up in the shadow of this great writer in the Englishness of the Graves household, while experiencing the ways of life of the Majorcans, which had hardly changed for hundreds of years.

Wonderfully observant, and full of feeling for the locality, this book is also a fascinating portrait of Robert Graves himself, his 'Muses', and his entourage, and a revealing study of how the son of a famous father finds his own identity.
  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409046295
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272
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About the author

William Graves

William Graves is Robert Graves's son and Literary Executor. He still lives in Deya, but earns a living as a geologist consulting to the oil industry. He is married with two children.

Praise for Wild Olives

In Wild Olives, William, the eldest son of Robert Graves's second marriage, has given us a delightful, personal account of life with father after the family's return to Majorca - all the local intrigues, litigation and gossip interlaced with vivid descriptions of the mental processes by which Graves imagined himself back into the past or made mercurially intuitive connections like some kind of literary Sherlock Holmes

Times Literary Supplement

An excellent short memoir, recalling the magic of his childhood on Majorca, but also showing how hard it is to live with such a father.

Derwent May, European

William Graves's forthright memoir not only gives a sharp account of Father's foibles but offers a fuller evocation of the swiftly changing scene at Deyá and Palma than in Robert's sketchy Majorca Observed.

London Magazine