In the wild there is no safety. The otter cub Tarka grows up with his mother and sisters, learning to swim, catch fish - and to fear the cry of the hunter and the flash of the metal trap. Soon he must fend for himself, travelling through rivers, woods, moors, ponds and out to sea, sometimes with the female otters White-tip and Greymuzzle, always on the run. Eventually, chased by a pack of hounds, he meets his nemesis, the fearsome dog Deadlock, and must fight for his life.

The classic story of an otter living in the Devonshire countryside which captures the feel of life in the wild as seen through the otter's own eyes.

Young Phillip Maddison (1953) was the third entry in Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It carries forward the story of Phillip as he grows towards manhood in the years immediately preceding the Great War. Unpredictable and wayward, Phillip nevertheless possesses a keen love of nature, which he indulges as best he can in the nearby countryside. But as his schooldays d...

Volume twelve of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. In this novel of the troubled and decadent years before the Second World War, Phillip Maddison sees the survivors of the Western Front as a phoenix generation impelled to reject the past in order to make a country 'fit for heroes'. Yet he remains aloof from any direct action, preferring to plan his own history of the Great War and its aftermath while becoming deeply involved in his own problems. Looking meanwhile over the internati...

Love and the Loveless (1958) was the seventh entry in Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. The year covered by this novel, 1917, was perhaps the darkest of the Great War, with widespread mutinies in the French Army after the disastrous Nivelle offensive. Phillip Maddison is now a young transport officer, tending pack animals, surviving amid devastation and death. His co...

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, remains best known for his nature stories set in North Devon, the much-loved classics Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. Between 1937 and 1945 he farmed 243 acres of difficult land in North Norfolk, bringing a near-derelict farm to an A grade classification during the years of the Second World War. Throughout those years he was writing newspaper articles, to help finance the farm, and Green Fields and Pavements is a collection of...

The Dark Lantern (1951) was the first of Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlightspanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. In it we meet Richard Maddison, a countryman working in London as a City clerk, struggling to make do on a few shillings a week. He falls for Hetty Turner, youngest daughter of a prosperous merchant, but her father rates Richard an unsuitable suitor.'There is magic in Henry Williamson's...

The Wet Flanders Plain was first published in 1929 - also the year of, inter alia, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Graves's Goodbye to All That, and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Henry Williamson's book stands alongside those works as a classic of the Great War.In 1928 Williamson revisited the battlefields of Flanders and Northern France in the company of a fellow veteran. He wanted to 'return to my old comrades... to the brown, the t...

Donkey Boy (1952) was the second entry in Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlightspanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It tells of Richard Maddison's first-born Phillip, nicknamed 'donkey boy' because his life was saved in infancy by being fed with ass's milk. The boy grows up in the Edwardian era, something of a misfit, at odds with his father.'With extraordinary skill and precision [Williamson] rebui...

Along the trackless and uncharted airlines from the southern sun they came, a lone pair of swallows, arriving with weakly and uncertain flight from over the wastes of the sea. They rested on a gorse bush, their blue backs beautiful against the store of golden blossom guarded by the jade spikes. The last day of March had just blown with the wind into eternity. Symbols of summer and of loveliness, they came with young April, while yet the celandines were unbleached, while the wild white stra...

How Dear is Life (1954) was the fourth entry in Henry Williamson's fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight spanning the years from the late Victorian period to the Second World War. It finds Phillip Maddison in the portentous months leading to the outbreak of war in 1914.Now a clerk in the Moon Fire Office, Phillip decides to join the territorials - attracted by the money, the camp near the sea, and the prospect of a new suit of clothes. As a glorious summer slips ...

The Innocent Moon (1961) was the ninth volume in Henry Williamson's great roman-fleuve, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight.It is the early 1920s and Phillip Maddison, out of the army, is determined to become a writer. When his career as a journalist founders, he retires to Devon on his motorcycle to share a cottage with a friend and devote himself to his work. But this arrangement does not succeed and before long Phillip finds himself alone. Meanwhile, his h...