Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay is a vivid portrait of the rural past of Blaxhall, a remote Suffolk village, in the time before mechanization changed the entire nature of farming, the landscape and rural life for good. In the 1950s, George Ewart Evans sought out those who could recall the nineteenth-century customs, crafts, dialects, tools, smugglers' tales and rural beliefs which had endured from the time of Chaucer, and created this fascinating picture of a now vanished world.

Following his two classics, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay and The Horse in the Furrow, renowned oral historian George Ewart Evans continues his study of the vanishing customs, working habits and rich language of the farming communities of East Anglia with The Pattern Under the Plough (Faber, 1966). Although based on East Anglia, this book was and remains of wider interest, for - as the author pointed out at the time - similar changes were occurring in North America, and also happening with remarkable speed in Africa. In chronicling the old culture George Ewart Evans has taken its two chief aspects, the home and the farm. He describes the house with its fascinating constructional details, the magic invoked for its protection, the mystique of the hearth, the link of the bees with the people of the house, and some of their fears and pre-occupations. Among the chapters on the farm is one of Evans's most original pieces of research: the description of the secret horse societies. Beautifully illustrated by David Gentleman, this book is important not only for the material it reveals about the past but for the implications for present-day society. 'As real (and as valuable) as the evidence unearthed by the spadework of archaeology.' Observer

George Ewart Evans was one of the pioneers of oral history. This anthology is drawn from his writings about the memories of men and women of a past era -- farm labourers, shepherds, horsemen, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, sailors, fishermen, miners, maltsters, domestic servants and many others. Ewart Evans gathered this unique testimony in rural East Anglia in the 1950s, just as mechanisation was taking over every aspect of life, preserving a wealth of human history and language in this fascinating and often moving anthology.

The pioneering oral historian, George Ewart Evans, began to record the farming ways of East Anglia in the 1950s by listening to old men and women whose memories went back more than fifty or sixty years. Many were agricultural labourers, born before the turn of the century, who had worked on farms before the arrival of mechanisation. It was assumed at that time that horses would soon disappear from the farms, and that this was the last chance of recording the part they had played for centuries. It later became clear that this forecast was too pessimistic and in Horse Power and Magic (Faber, 1979) Ewart Evans describes in fascinating detail some important farms where horses continued to be beneficially used more than thirty years later. He discovered that the traditions of the older horsemen had not died out but had been passed on, in only slightly attenuated form, to a younger generation keen to farm with horses, proving that the day of the heavy horse was by no means over. He also describes vividly the ways of horse-tamers whose skills had a touch of 'magic' about them. 'Taking his works a whole, there is no doubt that George Ewart Evans will survive as a fascinating pioneer of the extra-academic recording of human history...he has found a dimension all his own. This is indeed the very stuff of history.' Sunday Times

The Leaping Hare is a classic of nature writing, considering the wild hare in nature, poetry, folklore, history and art. George Ewart Evans was a pioneer of oral history, and the book features testimony from all walks of countryside life, which sings from the pages. A lovely book that is both exploratory and rooted in a sense of the hare's mystery .

For fans of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, a love story for the ages This is the account of Katie O’Toole, late of Lancaster Co., Pennsylvania, removed from her family by savages on March the 2nd in the year of our Lord 1747.The thirteenth child conceived of miserable Irish exiles, Katie O’Toole dreams of a different life. Little does she know that someone far away is dreaming of her. In 1747, savages raid her family home, and seventeen-year-old Katie is taken captive. Syawa and Hector have been searching for her, guided by Syawa’s dreams. A young Holyman, Syawa believes Katie is the subject of his Vision: the Creature of Fire and Ice, destined to bring a great gift to his people. Despite her flaming hair and ice-blue eyes, Katie is certain he is mistaken, but faced with returning to her family, she agrees to join them. She soon discovers that in order to fulfill Syawa’s Vision, she must first become his Spirit Keeper, embarking on an epic journey that will change her life—and heart—forever. Ideal for fans of The Son and Empire of the Summer Moon, this riveting novel will transport and enchant readers.

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.