Notwithstanding

As the world around it marches forward, the bucolic English village of Notwithstanding remains unchanged. It is, as it always has been, a place of pubs and cricket pitches, where local eccentrics a retired colonel who has eschewed clothes, a spiritualist living with the ghost of her husband, and a dog named Archibald Scott-Moncrieff "almost" fit in. In this delightfully evocative collection of stories, in which a young couple falls in and out of love by letter alone, an eleven-year-old boy battles a monstrous fish, and a man of the cloth has a premonition of death, Louis de Bernieres conjures up a rural idyll long since forgotten. Funny, bittersweet, and deeply felt, "Notwithstanding" is the bestselling author of "Corelli s Mandolin" at his most enchanting."