It Was the Nightingale

A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight #10

by Henry Williamson

The tenth volume of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight . After only a year of married happiness, Phillip Maddison experiences tragedy when his young wife dies in childbirth. Left with a baby son, a cat, a dog and an otter cub they had rescued while on holiday in France, Phillip must learn to endure the deepest grief. When the otter goes missing Phillip dedicates his life to searching for her along the riverways and upon the moors of the West Country, in the hope that the retrieval of her will grant him a new start in life. And on the day when the search culminates such a prospect opens before him: farming the land which he first knew in boyhood.

Genres: Fiction

358 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1998

About the author

Henry William Williamson was an English soldier, naturalist, farmer and ruralist writer known for his natural history and social history novels, as well as for his fascist sympathies. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book Tarka the Otter.

Henry Williamson is best known for a tetralogy of four novels which consists of The Beautiful Years (1921), Dandelion Days (1922), The Dream of Fair Women (1924) and The Pathway (1928). These novels are collectively known as The Flax of Dream and they follow the life of Willie Maddison from boyhood to adulthood in a rapidly changing world.

Reviews

[Paul Christensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

More on Philip’s ventures in the West Country,
Experiencing both tragedy and triumph;
A long hunt for an otter draws a book from him
That casts a cold, bright eye on nature’s violence;

And then another trouble - should he keep on writing books
Or follow his ancestral path of farming?
Should he search for ’ancient sunlight, which occurs again as Truth’,
Or till the land, to set the plough at charming?

[PAUL DEWSON · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this the tenth book in the series we experience the full range of human emotions. Philip Maddison goes through tragedy with the loss of his first wife to triumph as he remarries. Throughout which Williamson writes with poignancy, intensity, humour and humanity. But above all that running thread that connects all his work, his keen I for nature and his exquisite lyrical prose. Truly a beautiful work.