Description
Book SynopsisRemarkable.' THE TIMES
''Wonderful.' GUARDIAN
''Fascinating.'' TELEGRAPH
''As a portrait of a place, it's hard to better.' COUNTRY LIFE
''A thrill akin to discovering buried treasure.'' RICHARD MABEY
''Humane, humorous and joyful.'' RUTH SCURR
When the celebrated critic and cultural historian Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all.
As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects bringing a lifetime''s reading to bear on the place where she started hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area's past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see?
From the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to the lost local women who left little trace, these electrifying encounters spanning the Downs, Poland, Australia, Canada - insp
