Notwithstanding: Stories from an English Village

A Frenchman once pointed out to Louis de Bernières that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe, adding that it was 'an immense lunatic asylum'. Initially stunned by this proposition, de Bernières realised that the Frenchman was absolutely right, and cast his mind back to the village in southern Surrey where he grew up in the sixties and seventies. This book is not about an idyll that never was; it is about people who are worth remembering, whose lives are worth celebrating, and would otherwise have been forgotten.