Men and the Fields by Adrian Bell (Little Toller Books: 2009). This is an arch example of urban middle-class longing for the countryside: a full-throated 1939 threnody for the vanishing rural ways of East Anglia.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men words by James Agee, photographs by Walter Agee (Penguin Classics: 2006). This extraordina and unsparing 1936 record of sharecropper life in the US South was one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.
Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood (Vintage Classics: 1993). His first novel, this utterly authentic and angry 1933 portrayal of depression-era working-class life in Salford became an instant classic.
Fenwomen by Mary Chamberlain, photographs by Justin Partyka (Full Circle Editions Ltd.: 2011), 'a feminist Akenfield'. Virago's first non-fiction publication in 1975, this portrait of women in a fenland village is an essential counter voice to Ronald Blythe's Akenfield and George Ewart Evans’ Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay.
The Thirties: an Intimate History by Juliet Gardiner (Harper Press: 2011) is an exhilaratingly panoramic survey of a myriad contemporary sources.
Foxash (Tinder Press): Winner of the East Anglian Book Award for Fiction 2023
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