Alison Light – författare

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Common People: The History of An English Family by Alison Light, read by Caroline Laskowska.Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond. Epic in scope and deep in feeling, Common People is a family history but also a new kind of public history, following the lives of the migrants who travelled the country looking for work. Original and eloquent, it is a timely rethinking of who the English were - but ultimately it reflects on history itself, and on our constant need to know who went before us and what we owe them.

Most studies of the interwar years have focussed upon literary elites, rendering that past and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognise the extent to which the female population represented the nation between the wars. From the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, Forever England traces the making of a conservative national temperament which could be defensive and protective, yet modernising in outlook. In a series of literary anaylses, the author suggests some of the tones and accents of this new version of Englishness; in particular she looks at new kinds of readership and fiction, at the historical and emotional significance of the `whodunit'', the burgeoning of historical romance, and the creation of a middlebrow culture in the period.Forever England evokes a powerful sense of period and of the pleasures of reading, providing an intimate picture of interwar life from inside the English middle classes. As a feminist inquiry, it argues from a different kind of social and political history; one which makes connections between the interior structures of private life and their more public national forms. Controversially, it also urges that feminism deal with conservative, as well as radical, desires and their place in women''s lives.

Most studies of the interwar years have focussed upon literary elites, rendering that past and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognise the extent to which the female population represented the nation between the wars. From the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, Forever England traces the making of a conservative national temperament which could be defensive and protective, yet modernising in outlook. In a series of literary anaylses, the author suggests some of the tones and accents of this new version of Englishness; in particular she looks at new kinds of readership and fiction, at the historical and emotional significance of the `whodunit'', the burgeoning of historical romance, and the creation of a middlebrow culture in the period.Forever England evokes a powerful sense of period and of the pleasures of reading, providing an intimate picture of interwar life from inside the English middle classes. As a feminist inquiry, it argues from a different kind of social and political history; one which makes connections between the interior structures of private life and their more public national forms. Controversially, it also urges that feminism deal with conservative, as well as radical, desires and their place in women''s lives.

''Joins the very front rank of memoirs of post-war Britain'' DAVID KYNASTON''A winning blend of personal memories, evoked with startling clarity, and fascinating social history'' CLARE CHAMBERS

In Red, Red Robin, Alison Light puts herself into history, conjuring her girlhood from the 1950s to the 1970s, growing up in an extended family in Portsmouth, a blitzed city with its collective memory of war. Drawing on the souvenirs of her childhood - from her doll''s house to her infant and teenage diaries, her comics and schoolbooks - she uses her own story to tell a richly-textured social history of post-war England: its popular culture and music, its language and humour. Warm, witty and often moving, Light recalls the all-singing, all-dancing little girl who becomes a grammar-school snob; the street kid turned fashion-conscious teenager, searching for the ideal boy, navigating a rapidly modernising world and a family life equally transformed. Going to university, she asks: what does it mean to leave home - and do we ever truly leave?Beautifully crafted and deeply pleasurable, Red, Red Robin is an exploration of the making of an English girl and of her sense of self. It asks whether we can retain a strong attachment to our place of origin - honouring our histories and beliefs - while resisting both nostalgia and disavowal. In this lyrical, analytical and politically astute memoir, one of our most compelling writers evokes a child''s eye view of the past through the lens of her adult reflections, querying too how we document that past and the nature of memory itself.