Yesterday Morning: A Very English Childhood - Tapa blanda

A joy to read from start to finish - "Sunday Independent" Athill's astringent prose has the remarkable quality of making one look forward to old age - "Evening Standard" "Yesterday Morning" is a captivating book. It is as if she had set out with a butterfly net to catch everything about her early life in an upper-middle-class English family before it - or she - vanished: the beloved grand house in Norfolk, the servants, her unhappily married parents. - "Guardian" Athill's honesty in describing her feelings as a young girl and old woman makes her memoir universal. - "The Independent" Athill's writing is like a really good apple: crisp, juicy, at once sweet and tart. She describes youthful games and discoveries in a voice that manages to combine delighted immediacy and ironic distance....The book feels at times like a grab bag, a collection of all the odds and ends Athill traces to her early years - "The New York Times Book Review" A compulsively readable memoir of a golden age - "The Times" Athill has added importantly to those works of literature which illuminate the vagaries of human emotion. - "Daily Telegraph"

A remarkable, truthful and vivid recollection of childhood, from the author of Stet, After a Funeral, Don't Look at Me Like That and Instead of a Letter. Here Athill goes back to the beginning in a sharp evocation of a childhood unfashionably filled with happiness - a Norfolk country house, servants, the pleasures of horses, the unfolding secrets of adults and sex. This is England in the 1920s seen (with a clear and unsentimental eye) from the vantage point of England in 2001. It was a privileged and loving life: but did it equip the author to be happy?