Those Summers at Moon Farm

£16.95

Rex believes a man needs more than one woman. Hazel doesn’t agree with him. This is the story of their marriage, divorce and subsequent on-off affair.

The War over, Rex and Hazel and Alan and Margaret go to East Anglia to make their lives. Rex is a poet, Alan a farmer, and they and their wives bring clashing political allegiances to the sleepy village of Farthingale. At the beginning of the new decade Rex founds his poetry magazine Review 50, and Alan starts what is intended to be a pacifist farm. 

When Rex leaves Hazel in 1960, Alan and Margaret find her an abandoned old farmhouse and she and her children move in. This is about their plans, ideals, the compromises with reality, and what happens through the 1960s and 70s as their children grow and have their own ideas of freedom and peace. Rex’s view of his daughter Lynnet’s injunction to ‘Make Love not War’ differs from hers. His two wives have babies within months of one another and he glories in the epithet of male chauvinist pig. 

Here unfolds the conflict between men and women, mothers and daughters, and about the nature of Freedom, the constant struggle for it, and how that struggle affects human relationships.

ISBN: 9781852001414 

Size: 217x140mm 

Binding: hardback 

Length: 190pp

Rex believes a man needs more than one woman. Hazel doesn’t agree with him. This is the story of their marriage, divorce and subsequent on-off affair.

The War over, Rex and Hazel and Alan and Margaret go to East Anglia to make their lives. Rex is a poet, Alan a farmer, and they and their wives bring clashing political allegiances to the sleepy village of Farthingale. At the beginning of the new decade Rex founds his poetry magazine Review 50, and Alan starts what is intended to be a pacifist farm. 

When Rex leaves Hazel in 1960, Alan and Margaret find her an abandoned old farmhouse and she and her children move in. This is about their plans, ideals, the compromises with reality, and what happens through the 1960s and 70s as their children grow and have their own ideas of freedom and peace. Rex’s view of his daughter Lynnet’s injunction to ‘Make Love not War’ differs from hers. His two wives have babies within months of one another and he glories in the epithet of male chauvinist pig. 

Here unfolds the conflict between men and women, mothers and daughters, and about the nature of Freedom, the constant struggle for it, and how that struggle affects human relationships.

ISBN: 9781852001414 

Size: 217x140mm 

Binding: hardback 

Length: 190pp

About the author:

Carol Lake

Carol Lake won the Guardian Fiction Award for her first book Rosehill – Portraits from a Midlands City, and much acclaim for her second book Switchboard Operators, which subsequently became a television series by the same name. Both books were highly praised by critics and went on to become successful publications in hardback and paperback.

The author left school at 15, but went on to gain A-levels in English Literature and History. She has worked as a switchboard operator, run a secondhand bookshop and has been an assistant editor of a weekly news-sheet, as well as a typist, receptionist and nurse. More recently she has run a poetry class for juniors in the inner city of Derby. 

Apart from her novels she also writes occasional columns for various newspapers and magazines.