Chasing memories of the losses of his brother and father, the author, a young newspaper director and his Australian wife visit the Cotswolds. On a whim they buy a cottage and Ian resigns. They slowly get to know Norman, their inscrutable and apparently terrifying neighbour; Geoff, the ebullient landlord of their eclectic local - last bastion against the encroaching gastropub - and Tom, an ex-gamekeeper, who lets Ian see something of a hidden rural culture. The delightful aspects of village life and an ever-changing landscape is evocatively captured; but it is from working with Norman on his small chaotic farm that they learn about the loss of the countryside to industrial farming and of no-longer affordable housing to the dreaded 'white settlers'. And it is shadows of the past and a seemingly segregated social world around them that begin to cast doubts on whether this is the place for them.

Author Biography

Ian Walthew left school aged eighteen and spent six months walking across Spain, living as a tramp and following in the footsteps of the Cotswold writer Laurie Lee, who wrote about his pre-civil war journey in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Ian eventually fell into the newspaper industry and ended his media career as a worldwide Marketing Director on the executive board of the Paris-based newspaper The International Herald Tribune. After nearly a decade living and working abroad in Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris and travelling the world, he was thirty-four when he unexpectedly resigned and moved with his Australian wife Hannah to the Cotswolds. Previous titles: None.