The Dangerous Edge Of Things

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: As New
Jacket Condition: As New
Publisher: Doubleday
Publisher Place: Uk
Publisher Year: 2005
Edition: First Edition

Description: 336 pages. Book and Jacket appear to have hardly been read and are both in As new condition throughout.

Publishers Description: 1949: Candida Lycett Green describes one year in her magical childhood in the remote farming village of Farnborough in Berkshire, where she lived with her eccentric, bohemian upper-class parents among the local farming community. In one of the bleakest and highest spots in the county, 750 feet up in the windswept downland, Candida ran wild with a "Gang" of the children of the local farm labourers, and their discoveries and adventures are set against a vivid backdrop of village life and the unfolding agricultural and natural year. Parents play a minor part in the activities of The Gang, whose non-school hours are spent roaming freely around the countryside, and it is during these romps that Candida and her friend June become interested in the concept of Love.Their romantic imagination is fuelled by their secret surveillance of local beauty Ruby Mason, who they discover cleans the cottage of a reclusive German scientist working at the neighbouring Harwell Atomic Research Centre. A romance between Ruby and the German is imagined, or engineered, by Candida and Junes stealthy intervention, and the two girls spend the summer revelling in the secret love affair they seem to have instigated. Then sensational tragedy strikes. Rubys lover is no other than the idealistic Dr Klaus Fuchs, who was arrested for having passed the secret of the atom bomb to the Russians. Another eccentric subplot involves a World War One veteran living on the edge of the village with a female companion, who shows the children his medals, rants and rails against the Germans, but, when he dies, to the scandal of the village turns out to have been a woman.Beautifully written, infused with an irresistible love of the English countryside, and skilfully, daringly, combining real events and fiction, this is a book about childish adventure and loss of innocence that reminds us of an idyllic rustic way of life that has sadly passed forever.

ISBN: 9780385606776