As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1st Ed.)

Following the enthusiastic reception of Godine's reissue of Cider with Rosie, we are pleased to announce the second book in Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

"I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese. I was excited, vain-glorious, knowing I had far to go; but not, as yet, how far."

So starts the adventure of the young Laurie Lee, who walks from his tiny village in a remote corner of Gloucestershire, to London and into the twentieth century. Knowing one Spanish phrase, he decides to take the ferry to Spain.

Unbeknownst to Lee, Spain in 1934 was on the verge of war, and, inexorably, he becomes entangled in the passionate, violent and bloody confusion that was the Spanish Civil War.

Laurie Lee was born in 1914 in Stroud, Gloucestershire, and was brought up with his mother and many siblings. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then traveled on foot through Spain as described in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. He married Catherine Polge and had one daughter; he died in 1997.