by Diana Athill (Author)
A remarkable, truthful and vivid recollection of childhood, from the author of Stet, After a Funeral, Don't Look at Me Like That and Instead of a Letter. Here Athill goes back to the beginning in a sharp evocation of a childhood unfashionably filled with happiness - a Norfolk country house, servants, the pleasures of horses, the unfolding secrets of adults and sex. This is England in the 1920s seen (with a clear and unsentimental eye) from the vantage point of England in 2001. It was a privileged and loving life: but did it equip the author to be happy?
Format: Paperback
Pages: 176
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 06 Oct 2011
ISBN 10: 1847084265
ISBN 13: 9781847084262
A joy to read from start to finish - Sunday Independent
Athill's astringent prose has the remarkable quality of making one look forward to old age - Evening Standard
Yesterday Morning is a captivating book. It is as if she had set out with a butterfly net to catch everything about her early life in an upper-middle-class English family before it - or she - vanished: the beloved grand house in Norfolk, the servants, her unhappily married parents. - Guardian
Athill's honesty in describing her feelings as a young girl and old woman makes her memoir universal. - The Independent
Athill's writing is like a really good apple: crisp, juicy, at once sweet and tart. She describes youthful games and discoveries in a voice that manages to combine delighted immediacy and ironic distance....The book feels at times like a grab bag, a collection of all the odds and ends Athill traces to her early years - The New York Times Book Review
A compulsively readable memoir of a golden age - The Times
Athill has added importantly to those works of literature which illuminate the vagaries of human emotion. - Daily Telegraph