Described by Roger Deakin as ‘subtle and compassionate’ and by John Updike as ‘exquisite’, Akenfield is a portrait of an English village in the middle years of the 1960s, made up from the words of three generations of its inhabitants. Blythe’s records his conversations with the villagers with the accurate sympathy of an insider, and fleshes out his account with a certain amount of factual detail concerning the economics of village life, but Akenfield itself did not exist, being a composite of Charsfield in Suffolk, the author’s own adjoining village of Debach, and a few surrounding hamlets. Nevertheless, as The Guardian noted, ‘a hundred years from now, anyone wanting to know how things were on the land will turn more profitably to Akenfield than to a sheaf of anaemically professional social surveys.’

Penguin Books Ltd | Paperback 288 pp. |ISBN: 9780141187921