Yesterday Morning is a vivid recollection of Diana Athill's joyful beginnings. It is also a remarkable insight into a now vanished world; this is England in the 1920s, seen with a clear and unsentimental eye from the vantage point of the 21st century.
Growing up in a Norfolk country house with servants, Athill's upbringing was rich and loving: filled with the pleasures of horse riding and the unfolding secrets of adults and sex. However, here, she probes these foundations, asking: does privilege equate to happiness?
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 9781783788163
Number of pages: 176
Weight: 130 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 10 mm
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. - Kate Kellaway, 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
Please sign in to write a review
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?
