'If ever I saw blessing in the air I see it now in this still early day...' Laurie Lee is beloved for his writing on a lost rural world. His evocative poetry springs from his deep connection with nature, as he tracks the seasons changing and the years turning over. Yet Lee's poems also captured war, human relationships and distant places, informed by his own experiences of lives uprooted by change and conflict. Written during the course of his lifetime, the verses brought together in Collected Poems range over Lee playing his fiddle in a Spanish town; ecstatic in springtime of his beloved Slad valley; or digging for faith in the depths of winter. Gathered in one volume for the first time, and including a generous selection of previously unseen verses from Lee's archives, these timeless, poignant poems show him expressing the essence of life, love and loss.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is the moving follow-up to Laurie Lee's acclaimed Cider with Rosie Abandoning the Cotswolds village that raised him, the young Laurie Lee walks to London. There he makes a living labouring and playing the violin. But, deciding to travel further a field and knowing only the Spanish phrase for 'Will you please give me a glass of water?', he heads for Spain. With just a blanket to sleep under and his trusty violin, he spends a year crossing Spain, from Vigo in the north to the southern coast. Only the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War puts an end to his extraordinary peregrinations . . . 'He writes like an angel and conveys the pride and vitality of the humblest Spanish life with unfailing sharpness, zest and humour' Sunday Times 'There's a formidable, instant charm in the writing that genuinely makes it difficult to put the book down' New Statesman 'A beautiful piece of writing' Observer

'Magical' Daily Mail 'I finished it with an ache in my heart and a tear in my eye' Spectator From the author of Cider With Rosie, Village Christmas is a moving, lyrical portrait of England through the changing years and seasons. Laurie Lee left his childhood home in the Cotswolds when he was nineteen, but it remained with him throughout his life until, many years later, he returned for good. This collection brings to life the sights, sounds, landscapes and traditions of his home - from centuries-old May Day rituals to his own patch of garden, from carol singing in crunching snow to pub conversations and songs. Here too he writes about the mysteries of love, living in wartime Chelsea, Winston Churchill's wintry funeral and his battle, in old age, to save his beloved Slad Valley from developers. Told with a warm sense of humour and a powerful sense of history, Village Christmas brings us a picture of a vanished world. 'Brings to life the landscapes and traditions of Lee's home in Gloucestershire, from centuries-old May Day rituals and carol-singing on Christmas Eve, to his battle in old age to save his beloved Slad valley from developers' Guardian 'Simply written, observant and shot through with Lee's characteristic humility ... Against his whitewashed prose are touches of beauty' The Times Literary Supplement

How do you remember the summers of your childhood? For Laurie Lee they were flower-crested, heady, endless days. Here is an evocation of summer like no other - a remote valley filled with the scent of hay, jazzing wasps, blackberries plucked and gobbled, and games played until the last drop of dusk. Lee's joyful and stirring writing captures the very essence of England's golden season. Selected from the book Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee 'An enchanting book, an exquisite farewell, not only to childhood, and boyhood, but also to an England that has vanished' J.B. Priestly VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.

A Moment of War is the powerful and harrowing final book in Laurie Lee's acclaimed trilogy that began with Cider with Rosie Laurie Lee was still a young man when he decided to fight for the Republican cause in Spain's civil war. But though he braved icy, storm-swept mountains alone to contact Republican sympathisers, he was immediately suspected of being a Nationalist spy. Imprisoned and almost executed by his own side, he eventually joined the International Brigade. This is the story of his experiences as a Republican soldier, fighting for the losing side in a doomed war. 'A great, heart-stopping narrative of one young Englishman's part in the war in Spain . . . crafted by a poet, stamping an indelible image of the boredom, random cruelty and stupidity of war' - Literary Review 'This story aches with unforgotten cold and trembles with unforgotten terror' -Guardian Laurie Lee has written some of the best-loved travel books in the English language. Born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, he was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as he recounted in A Moment of War. In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter. Laurie Lee published four collections of poems: The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), My Many-Coated Man (1955) and Pocket Poems (1960). His other works include The Voyage of Magellan (1948), A Rose for Winter (1955), The Firstborn (1964), I Can't Stay Long (1975) and Two Women (1983). He also wrote three bestselling volumes of autobiography: Cider with Rosie (1959), which has sold over six million copies worldwide, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). He died in May 1997.

A moving portrait of the landscape that shaped the life of Laurie Lee, the beloved author of Cider With Rosie 'Before I left the valley I thought everywhere was like this. Then I went away for 40 years and when I came back I realized that nowhere was like this.' Laurie Lee walked out of his childhood village one summer morning to travel the world, but he was always drawn back to his beloved Slad Valley, eventually returning to make it his home. In this portrait of his Cotswold home, Laurie Lee guides us through its landscapes, and shares memories of his village youth - from his favourite pub to winter skating on the pond, the church through the seasons, local legends, learning the violin and playing jazz records in the privy on a wind-up gramophone. Filled with wry humour and a love of place, Down in the Valley is a writer's tribute to the landscape that shaped him, and where he found peace.

'I remember, too, the light on the slopes, long shadows in tufts and hollows, with cattle, brilliant as painted china, treading their echoing shapes 'Cider With Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of Laurie Lee' s childhood and youth in a remote Cotswold village. From the moment he is set down in the long grass, 'thick as a forest and alive with gras shoppers', he depicts a word that is both tangibly real yet belonging to a now distant past.

'They are memorials to times and countries whose best is probably past and gone . . . I was lucky to have known them when I did, before darkness began to fall from the air.' When Laurie Lee first left his country village aged nineteen, he discovered a delight in the outside world that remained undiminished throughout his writing life. This enchanting collection of his 'first loves and obsessions' brings together pieces including recollections of his Gloucestershire childhood celebrated in Cider With Rosie; reflections on life, love and death, such as a moving report from the tragic Welsh village of Aberfan; and evocative travel writings on Tuscany, Mexico and the West Indies, amongst others, before they were transformed by mass tourism. Together they capture a world that is lost forever. 'One of Britain's finest writers' Daily Mail 'There's a formidable, instant charm in the writing that genuinely makes it difficult to put the book down' New Statesman

Poet Laurie Lee was born in 1914 in a small Cotswold village and grew up during a time of change when the rural traditions of past centuries were being swept aside in the path of twentieth-century progress. His autobiography Cider with Rosie, a poetic evocation of his childhood, has become a modern classic both in the United Kingdom and in America and is here imaginatively adapted for the stage by James Roose-Evans.4 women, 5 men

A beautiful new edition of Laurie Lee's celebrated autobiographical trilogy: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War 'I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.' 'This trilogy is a sequence of early recollections, beginning with the dazzling lights and sounds of my first footings on earth in a steep Cotswold valley some three miles long. For nineteen years this was the limit of my world, then one midsummer morning I left home and walked to London and down the blazing length of Spain during the innocent days of the early thirties. Never had I felt so fat with time, so free to go where I would. Then such indulgence was suddenly broken by the savage outbreak of the Civil War . . .' - Laurie Lee

Andalusia is a passion - and fifteen years after his last visit Laurie Lee returned. He found a country broken by the Civil War, but the totems of indestructible Spain survive: the Christ in agony, the thrilling flamenco cry-the pride in poverty, the gypsy intensity in vivid whitewashed slums, the cult of the bullfight, the exultation in death, the humour of hopelessness-the paradoxes deep in the fiery bones of Spain.

Rich with kaleidoscopic images, A Rose for Winter is as sensual and evocative as the sun-scorched landscape of Andalusia itself.