Yesterday Morning: A Very English Childhood - Softcover

Athill, Diana

3.89

249 ratings by Goodreads

9781847084262: Yesterday Morning: A Very English Childhood

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847084265 ISBN 13: 9781847084262

Publisher: Granta Books, 2012

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A remarkable, truthful and vivid recollection of childhood, from the author of Stet, After a Funeral, Don't Look at Me Like That and Instead of a Letter. Here Athill goes back to the beginning in a sharp evocation of a childhood unfashionably filled with happiness - a Norfolk country house, servants, the pleasures of horses, the unfolding secrets of adults and sex. This is England in the 1920s seen (with a clear and unsentimental eye) from the vantage point of England in 2001. It was a privileged and loving life: but did it equip the author to be happy?

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About the Author:

DIANA ATHILL was born in 1917. She helped Andre Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. Athill's distinguished career as an editor is the subject of her acclaimed memoir Stet, which is also published by Granta Books, as are five volumes of memoirs, Instead of a Letter, After a Funeral, Yesterday Morning, Make Believe, Somewhere Towards the End and a novel, Don't Look at Me Like That.In January 2009, she won the Costa Biography Award for Somewhere Towards the End, and was presented with an OBE. She lives in London.

Review:

A joy to read from start to finish - "Sunday Independent"
Athill's astringent prose has the remarkable quality of making one look forward to old age - "Evening Standard"
"Yesterday Morning" is a captivating book. It is as if she had set out with a butterfly net to catch everything about her early life in an upper-middle-class English family before it - or she - vanished: the beloved grand house in Norfolk, the servants, her unhappily married parents. - "Guardian"
Athill's honesty in describing her feelings as a young girl and old woman makes her memoir universal. - "The Independent"
Athill's writing is like a really good apple: crisp, juicy, at once sweet and tart. She describes youthful games and discoveries in a voice that manages to combine delighted immediacy and ironic distance....The book feels at times like a grab bag, a collection of all the odds and ends Athill traces to her early years - "The New York Times Book Review"
A compulsively readable memoir of a golden age - "The Times"
Athill has added importantly to those works of literature which illuminate the vagaries of human emotion. - "Daily Telegraph"

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