Akenfield · Portrait of an English Village

Woven from the words of the inhabitants of a small Suffolk village in the 1960s,* Akenfield* is a masterpiece of twentieth-century English literature, a scrupulously observed and deeply affecting portrait of a place and people and a now vanished way of life. Ronald Blythe’s wonderful book raises enduring questions about the relations between memory and modernity, nature and human nature, silence and speech.