Items related to Opposite the Cross Keys
Synopsis
"I stood outside the Cross Keys feeling the way I imagine the Pope feels when he arrives in a new country and the first thing he does is go down on his kneeds and kiss the ground: humble and at the same time triumphant."
Great writing about childhood can do much more than evoke a particular time and place; it can illuminate the universal experience of being a child in an adult's world-up to the moment when the child crosses the line between innocence and experience. For Sylvie Haymon, that moment came at the age of ten, in the home of her nursemaid's family, who lived opposite the Cross Keys pub in the tiny, staggeringly poor village of Salham St. Awdry, just four miles from her parents' comfortable house in Norwich.
Sylvie had grown accustomed to living in two separate worlds-the respectable English home of her well-educated, well-behaved parents, who left the childrearing to a nursemaid named Maud Fenner, and the irresistibly dirty, undisciplined, and emotionally intense household where Maud's family, along with their astonishing neighbour, Chicken, taught a "proper little snob" about real life. It was this second, more primitive, world that shone the brighter for Sylvie.
Opposite the Cross Keys is a rich and rewarding work-an honest, unsentimental, sometimes funny, and sometimes heartbreaking story that captures the wonder and terror of childhood and childhood's end.
'Robust and plain-speaking . . . Sylvia Haymon is exceptionally good at the half-understood overheard conversation of adults when we are children . . . We are in the presence of one of those runaway storytellers.' Daily Telegraph
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About the Author
"One of the purest lyric voices in the mystery field" New York Times Book Review
Sylvia Theresa Haymon was born in Norwich, and is best known for her eight crime fiction novels featuring the character Inspector Ben Jurnet. Haymon also wrote two non-fiction books for children, as well as two memoirs of her childhood in East Anglia.
The Ben Jurnet series enjoyed success in both the UK and the US during Haymon's lifetime: Ritual Murder (1982) won the prestigious CWA Silver Dagger Award from the Crime Writers' Association. Stately Homicide (1984), a skilful variation on the country house mystery, was praised by the New York Times as a 'brilliantly crafted novel of detection...stylish serious fiction', and favourably compared to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers.
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- PublisherBello
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 1447225236
- ISBN 13 9781447225232
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages258
- Rating
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