The day the First World War broke out, Alfie |Summerfield's father promised he wouldn't go away to fight - but he broke that promise the following day. Four years later, Alfie doesn't know where his father might be, other than that he's away  on a special, secret mission.
    Then while shining shoes at Kings Cross Station, Alfie unexpectedly sees his father's name on a sheaf of papers belonging to a military doctor. Bewildered and confused, Alfie realises his father is in a hospital close by - a hospital treating soldiers with an unusual condition. Alfie is determined to rescue his father from this strange, unnerving place...

Taking An Interest by D J Taylor

Introduction from A Distant Cry Stories from East Anglia Chosen by Peter Tolhurst, 2002,  Black Dog Books Norwich: D J Taylor was born and educated firstly in Norwich to which he and his family have recently returned. His firs, partly autobiographical, novel English Settlement (1996) won the the Grinzane Cavour Award. He has also written several studies of modern British fiction and a biography of Thackery. His most recent novel The Comedy Man (2001) is set partly in Great Yarmouth. Several short stories with an East Anglian setting, including Taking An Interest, appeared in his collection After Bathing At Baxter's (1997) while Passage Migrants....was one of the series 'Tales from East Anglia' broadcast last year on BBC Radio 3. Taylor's centenary biography of George Orwell will be published in 2003. 


First Published 1999

The Maze by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Introduction from A Distant Cry Stories from East Anglia Chosen by Peter Tolhurst, 2002,  Black Dog Books Norwich: In 1922 Warner travelled to East Chaldon in Dorset to meet the writer T F Powys whose allegorical tales she much admired. As a result she decided to rent a cottage in the village and a highly influential friendship grew out of that first meeting. Through her contact with David Garnett at Chatto and Windus Warner arranged for Powys' stories to be published. Four years later, following the appearance of her first novel Lolly Willows, Warner went to stay with Garnett at Hilton Hall on the edge of the Fens. There she was much taken with the pillar on the green erected to the memory of William Sparrow in the centre of a turf maze cut by him to celebrate the Restoration of 1660. The maze, in which Mr Slumber is, by her own admission, an affectionate portrait of Garnett, appeared in the The Salutation (1932), Warner's collection of decidly Powysian short stories.   First Published 1932

Mr Campion's Fox by Mike Ripley

As a favour to the Danish ambassador, Albert Campion and his son Rupert begin to shadow Soho photographer Francis Tate, without realizing they too are being shadowed. It seems that young Mr Tate, clearly enamoured with the ambassador's teenage daughter, is involved in more than landscape photography. When a body is found "orribly murdered" (as Lugg would say) on the Suffolk coast and the  ambassador's daughter disappears without trace, various parties - including the Campion clan -descend on the isolated town of Gapton and the hunt begins for a killer, a smuggler, a spy and a missing girl. Campion is older, wiser and perhaps vulnerable, though just as sharp as ever; and with Lady Amanda at his side and Lugg looking over his shoulder, who would bet against him?   First Published 2015 by Severn House Publishers Limited. 

The Mildenhall Treasure by Roald Dahl

Introductory abstract from A Distant Cry Stories from East Anglia Chosen by Peter Tolhurst, 2002,  Black Dog Books Norwich:  Long before the success of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1963) established him as one of the great children's authors, Dahl was still living with his mother in Oxfordshire where he managed to scrape a living as a short story writer. In April 1946 he read about the fabulous hoard of Roman silver that had been unearthed in the fens. The richness of the hoard and the mysterious nature of its discovery excited the young writer and he set off immediately for Suffolk in search of Gordon Butcher, the ploughman who had found the treasure four years earlier. Dahl overcame Butcher's initial reluctance to talk by promising to write an honest account of what happened and to give Butcher half the proceeds from the story which he sold soon after to an American newspaper. It was another thirty years before The Mildenhall Treasure first appeared in this country in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (1977).

First Published 1997 in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Jonathan Cape. 

The Lady in the Castle by William Gaunt

Publisher's Blurb: The author of  The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy and The Aesthetic Adventure became so intrigued with a fifteenth-century family history uncovered by his researches that he decided to make it the basis of his first novel. It is a book that will surely appeal both to his present readers and to a large new public. Readers of  The Paston Letters will be delighted to know that the lady of the title is the famous Margaret Mauteby, who married the son of Judge Paston, and the castle is Caister, which the Pastons inherited from Sir John Fastolf, the ruins of which still satnd on the Norfolk coast.
    In the absence of her husband, and while coping with an extraordinarily difficult series of domestic problems, Margaret valiantly fought the the Pastons' many enemies, notably Lord Moleyns, who evicted her forcibly from her home, and the Duke of Norfolk, who took advantage of Edward IV's struggle against Warwick to lay seige to her castle.
    Mr Gaunt presents a magnicent and detailed panorama of England during the War of the Roses. There are unexpected but welcome pictures of a prisoner's life in the Fleet and a wastrel's in London, for example. And standing alwaysin the forefront of the picture, symbolising as it were the gallant fight against the lawessness of feudalism in its last convulsion, is the figure of Margaret Mauteby, a remarkable heroine of a remarkable  novel.

First Published 1956, W.H.Allen London

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