I have had a passion for history since childhood and a fascination with the lives of the people who lived it, be they Roman legionaries, crusaders, or lost Arctic explorers. I see my life as a thread woven through the web of history and Lands of Lost Content is an attempt to trace that tangled thread through my lost childhood to the characters and events that shaped me and my world. For me, the best memoirs examine the fragments of childhood as a way of understanding some deep passion or of recapturing some unremembered world. I have lived by writing other people’s stories, now it’s my turn. I hope you enjoy my journey.
This book resonates strongly with me as it is partly set in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) when I was there as a young, naive geologist. But it is much more than that. It is a child’s view of a dysfunctional family struggling amidst the chaos of civil war and the changes that independence brings. Yet, despite her mother’s alcoholism and the trials of getting by in a radically changing society, Fuller never loses a child’s perspective and the story is laced with beauty and humour—there are places for tears and belly laughs.
Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, a story of civil war and a family's unbreakable bond.
How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.
As the daughter of white settlers in war-torn 1970s Rhodesia, Alexandra Fuller remembers a time when a schoolgirl was as likely to carry a shotgun as a satchel. This is her story - of a civil war, of a quixotic battle…
Like Fuller’s book, Angela’s Ashes describes a harsh childhood in a lost world, in this case the slums of Limerick in Ireland in the 1930s and 40s. It is altogether a grimmer book, although leavened with wry Irish wit and vivid descriptions of the people and places. The book is beautifully written, but McCourt has been criticized for overdoing the misery and fictionalizing incidents, which raises the question of where to draw the line between fact and fiction in memoirs when you often only have imperfect memories to draw on. I was occasionally shocked when I managed to research an incident from my childhood in Lands of Lost Content only to discover that my fondly believed family story was wildly inaccurate.
The author recounts his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn as the child of Irish immigrants who decide to return to worse poverty in Ireland when his infant sister dies.
In stark contrast to the gloom of depression-era Limerick, Cider with Rosie is a paean to the idyllic lost world of rural England at approximately the same time. Lee was a poet and his prose sings as he describes his family, “a sprawling, cumbersome, countrified brood” and the old people of the village, “…white-whiskered, gaitered, booted and bonneted, ancient-tongued last of their world.” Growing up in the west of Scotland, I knew nothing of Lee’s world and lived a young city life radically different from his, and yet his writing and imagery drew me so far in that I missed his world as if it had been my own. If I have given a moment of that feeling to readers of Lands of Lost Content then I have succeeded.
A re-issue of the evocative and nostalgic account of Lee's country childhood in a secluded Cotswold valley. Lee describes a vanished rural world of village schools and church outings but also touches on the darker side of village life as it comes into contact with murder, rape, suicide and depression.
This was a difficult pick because it’s not an easy read and, like Angela’s Ashes, has been surrounded by controversy over some incidents. Nevertheless, it is an immensely powerful book based upon the real experiences of a child soldier. Beah has lost two childhoods. The first was 12 years of happy, RAP obsessed kid growing up in rural Sierra Leone. From this, he is ripped by his country’s civil war and forced, through intimidation, violence, and drugs to become a child soldier and commit horrendous acts. Eventually, he is rescued by UNICEF, rehabilitated, and regains his humanity. Several of my novels—Flames of the Tiger, Four Steps to Death—examine young people caught up in war, but a long way gone goes much farther in examining and explaining how children can be dreadfully manipulated and turned into unemotional killing machines.
This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this…
As a corollary of my fascination with the cultural watershed of the First World War, I am drawn to the world that was destroyed in the mud of Flanders. From our removal in time, it is impossible to view that vanished world other than through the lens of the horrors that came after and destroyed it, making it difficult to access other than through history books. Some memoirs of the First World War (eg. Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth), devote significant space to the pre-war days but very few look exclusively at that time. Sassoon’s book does, although he hides his memoir behind changed names (even the author is called George Sherston), and claims of novelization. Despite this, it is a clear picture of a certain class in England prior to 1914 presented as a lament for a lost age.
The first volume in Siegfried Sassoon’s beloved trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, with a new introduction by celebrated historian Paul Fussell
A highly decorated English soldier and an acclaimed poet and novelist, Siegfried Sassoon won fame for his trilogy of fictionalized autobiographies that wonderfully capture the vanishing idylls of Edwardian England and the brutal realities of war.
In this first novel of the semiautobiographical George Sherston trilogy, Sassoon wonderfully captures the vanishing idylls of the Edwardian English countryside. Never out of print since its original publication in 1928, when it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Sassoon's…
My love of history began with Imperial India and fabulous sunlit tales of earthquakes, rebellion, and crocodile hunting told around a hissing gas fireplace while cold Scottish rain drummed outside. Then I added my own history—troubled teenage years in gang-ridden Paisley, fieldwork in war-torn Rhodesia—but I have never lost sight of the other characters whose existence in some unexpected ways have moulded who I am—a Scottish woman doctor in Russia in 1917, a monk seeking the ends of the earth to rest St. Andrews’ bones.
This is the tale of how a painfully shy, lonely kid wandered through the byways of history, both personal and general, and grew into an award-winning author and storyteller. It’s an ongoing process, but Lands of Lost Content is the story so far.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
