A House in Flanders
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In 1951 Michael Jenkins, then 14 years old, spent the summer with 'the aunts in Flanders'. His 'aunts' were a group of elderly women whose connection to his family had never been explained but they immediately embraced him and he quickly became entwined in the lives of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins.
The warmth of their life awakes Michael to the complicated world of relationships as he falls in love for the first time. Michael Jenkins's vivid memoir of a summer that changed his life has become a much-loved classic, with its evocative portraits of his aunts, the raw memories of two world wars that still scar the Flanders plain and Michael's unraveling of the secret at the heart of this family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jenkins, Great Britain's ambassador to the Netherlands, charmingly recalls a summer holiday in 1951 that he spent with his French relatives on a Flanders estate. At age 14, the boy is instantly at home among proper but colorful older family members: ladies widowed, orphaned or left unwed by two world wars, and their few surviving brothers, scarred veterans. Tante Yvonne keeps firm but diplomatic control of the household and farm, and it is she who teaches Jenkins ancestral values rooted in the land. All of Jenkins's French relatives captivate him, but especially matriarchal Yvonne, who never allows her burdens to spoil her joy of life. Jenkins's recreation of his first experiences of a foreign culture lingers long after the book's end.
