The best portrait of rural life in England Roger DeakinExquisite John UpdikeThe finest contemporary writer on the English countryside ObserverRonald Blythes perceptive and vivid evocation of the rural Suffolk he had known since childhood was acclaimed as an instant classic when it was published in 1969. It reverberates with the voices of the village inhabitants from the reminiscences of survivors of the Great War evoking days gone by to the concerns of a younger generation of farmworkers and the fascinating and personal recollections of among others the local schoolteacher doctor blacksmith saddler district nurse and magistrate. Providing insights into the land education welfare class religion and death Akenfield forms a unique document of a way of life that has in many ways disappeared.