Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Rural

This celebration of the English countryside does not only focus on the rolling green landscapes and magnificent monuments that set England apart from the rest of the world. Many of the contributors bring their own special touch, presenting a refreshingly eclectic variety of personal icons, from pub signs to seaside piers, from cattle grids to canal boats, and from village cricket to nimbies.

Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past.

One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on. Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly – and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return.

In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham.

1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’. Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it.

Zoë Colville spent years in a fancy hair salon with a long list of clients, living on cigarettes, croissants, and a shoestring. It was everything she'd ever wanted. But when an unexpected and overwhelming loss caused her life to shift unexpectedly, she found herself on a different path. One where the only use for a hairdryer is warming new-born lambs; where the cycle of life on a farm gives new meaning on purpose, and where nature is both a strict teacher and a balm to soothe the pressures of everyday life.

A way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban. In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people. In contrast to the usual insulting stereotypes, we discover a rich and complex culture: traditions, songs, celebrations, and revolts, across Europe from the plains of Poland to the farmsteads and villages of Italy and Ireland, through the 19th century to the present day.

As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in 20th-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that so many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants' balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers.

Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as an MP of Britain's most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontier land, and in the spirit of its people. Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Debatable Land is an unforgettable portrait of rural Britain today, as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria.

Growing up gifted and working-class in the foothills of the Ozarks, Monica and Darci became fast friends. The girls bonded over a shared love of learning as they navigated the challenges of their declining town and tumultuous family lives - broken marriages, shuttered stores and factories. They pored over the giant map in their classroom, tracing their fingers over the world that awaited them, vowing to escape. In the end, Monica left Clinton for university and fulfilled her dreams. Darci, along with many in their circle of friends, did not.

From a 2017 Pulitzer-winning newspaperman, an unsentimental ode to America's heartland as seen in small-town Iowa—a story of reinvention and resilience, environmental and economic struggle, and surprising diversity and hope.

The countryside is almost sacred to many Britons. There is a depth of feeling about rural places, the moors and lochs, valleys and mountains, cottages and country houses. Yet the British countryside, so integral to our national identity, is rarely seen as having anything to do with British colonialism. In Our Island Stories, Corinne Fowler brings rural life and colonial rule together with transformative results. Through ten country walks with varied companions, Fowler combines local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton.

Although common, moles are mysterious: their habits are inscrutable, they are anatomically bizarre and they live completely alone. Marc Hamer has come closer to them than most, both through his long working life out in the Welsh countryside and his experiences of rural homelessness as a boy, sleeping in hedgerows. Over the years, Marc has learned a great deal about these small, velvet creatures who live in the dark beneath us and the myths that surround them, and his work has also led him to a wise and uplifting acceptance of the inevitable changes that we all face.

When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the DC metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home, well, isolated. Even provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form. Or so we have been taught to believe.

In the tiny farm town of Emmett, Idaho, there are two kinds of people: those who leave and those who stay. Those who leave go in search of greener pastures, better jobs, and college. Those who stay are left to contend with thinning communities, punishing government farm policy, and environmental decay. Grace Olmstead, now a journalist in Washington, DC, is one who left, and in Uprooted, she examines the heartbreaking consequences of uprooting - for Emmett, and for the greater heartland America.