Henry Williamson

Richard Maddison, a clerk in the City of London, struggles on a few shillings a week. He meets Hetty Turney, daughter of a prosperous city merchant and falls in love, but he is not the kind of man her father wants her to marry. Will he ever be able to win her hand?

This is volume 2 of Williamson's acclaimed novel sequence: 'A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight'. It tells of Richard Maddison's first-born son 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.

The story of Salar and his migration through the rivers of Devon leaves us with a vivid unsentimental picture of how both people and wildlife rely on a river and its estuary.

Henry Williamson, best known as the author of 'Tarka the Otter' (954), tells of his struggles to renovate Old Hall Farm at Stiffkey, which he bought in a derelict state in 1936. He hasn't the slightest idea of how to go about the job of farming and the stories of his hopelessness, told with dry humour, are offset by a fascinating account of how things gradually begin to work.

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.