‘This story aches with unforgotten cold and trembles with unforgotten terror’ — Guardian The concluding volume of Laurie Lee’s celebrated trilogy — which opens with Cider with Rosie — A Moment of War is both powerful and harrowing. Still a young man, Lee made the decision to cross icy, storm-swept mountains alone in order to join the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. His reception was far from welcoming: immediately suspected of being a Nationalist spy, he was imprisoned and came close to execution at the hands of the very side he had come to support. He eventually secured his place in the International Brigade, and this is the unflinching account of what he witnessed and endured as a Republican soldier fighting for the losing side in a doomed conflict. ‘A great, heart-stopping narrative of one young Englishman’s part in the war in Spain . . . crafted by a poet, stamping an indelible image of the boredom, random cruelty and stupidity of war’ — Literary Review Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, and educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At nineteen he walked to London, then travelled through Spain on foot, where the outbreak of the Civil War stranded him — an experience later recounted in A Moment of War. He married Catherine Polge in 1950 and they had one daughter. He published four poetry collections: The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), My Many-Coated Man (1955) and Pocket Poems (1960), alongside other works including The Voyage of Magellan (1948), A Rose for Winter (1955), The Firstborn (1964), I Can’t Stay Long (1975) and Two Women (1983). His three bestselling volumes of autobiography — Cider with Rosie (1959), which has sold over six million copies worldwide, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991) — remain among the most cherished travel memoirs in the English language. He died in May 1997.
ISBN 13: 9780241953297
Author: Laurie Lee
