Notwithstanding

Casting his mind back to the village in southern Surrey where he grew up in the sixties and seventies, but plagued by a novelist's inability to stick to the truth, Louis de Bernieres brings us in "Notwithstanding" stories of a vanished England which will delight readers of his much-loved novels.

The English village was a place where an old lady might dress as a man in plus fours and spend her time shooting squirrels with a twelve bore, or keep a vast menagerie in her house. A retired general might give up wearing clothes, a spiritualist might live in a cottage with her sister and the ghost of her husband, and people might think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed.

De Bernieres' characters roam through the book, appearing in each others' stories and painting a picture of an entire community.