The Slightly Foxed office is always busy but there’s something about the arrival of autumn – brisker air, shorter days, everyone back together again after the summer holidays – that brings a burst of extra energy with it. As always at this time of year, we’re finalizing arrangements for Readers’ Day, which is on 8 November at our usual Bloomsbury meeting place, the Art Workers’ Guild in Queen Square. For those who haven’t yet experienced it, it’s always a jolly occasion, winding up with cake and a convivial glass of Madeira. This year we have a great line-up, including Tim Kendall on his edition of the letters between William Golding and his editor at Faber, Charles Monteith; Sarah Anderson and Martin Latham on the art of book selling; Maggie Fergusson on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins; and Catherine Coldstream on her much praised memoir Cloistered, an account of the years she spent as a nun in an enclosed Carmelite order. We still have a few tickets left, so if you’re interested, do get in touch as soon as possible.
Our Slightly Foxed Edition this autumn is another outstanding memoir, First Light by Geoffrey Wellum (see p. 12), a young pilot who volunteered for the RAF when he was still a 17-year-old school boy in March 1939. There have been other, famous accounts of flying in the Battle of Britain and after, but none perhaps that take the reader so close to the feelings of a young pilot facing death several times a day in the skies over southern England and northern France. It’s truly an incredible story told by an exceptionally brave and modest man.
In complete contrast, one of our most popular SFEs, Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, is now available in a Plain Foxed Edition, illustrated with John Ward’s charming original line drawings. In it, Lee describes his childhood in a remote Cotswold valley in the years during and after the First World War. His father walked out at the end of the war, leaving his mother in a crumbling cottage with eight children, four of whom were not her own. As Laurie Lee acknowledges, village life could be brutal. Yet despite the poverty, for him the village of Slad and the surrounding valley were a small, magical, self-contained world, and his sensuous child’s eye view of the countryside, his warm, hugger- mugger home and his untidy, indomitable mother, is irresistible. And finally, a treat in store from Ysenda Maxtone Graham, well known to readers for her non-fiction bestseller Terms & Conditions and her contributions to Slightly Foxed. Love Divine (see p.29), a light-hearted novella with some serious questions at its heart, is set in Lamley Green, a pretty village on the outskirts of London. As the story, and a new year, open there’s a general feeling of unease in the village. Its parish church St Luke’s is without a rector, while difficult experiences and unsettling events are troubling several of the parishioners. Extracts from letters, texts, sermons and parish council minutes dotted through the narrative mark the progress of a year in which, for each of the story’s main characters, much happens and much is learned. It’s a funny, sharply observed little picture of parish life, which also affectionately points up what’s wrong – and what’s right – with the modern C of E. Preorder now for publication on 1 November and cross another present off the Christmas list!
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