Customer Reviews:
 Super absorbing read December 27, 2008
Booklady (Ireland)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I own every book Adam Nicolson has written. He writes beautiful prose and he writes with great sincerity and feeling. This was another book in the same glorious tradition and immensely enjoyable. Precious few authors can write as well as this
Beautifully written November 18, 2008
Robert Ray (Sassafras, Victoria Australia)
42 out of 42 found this review helpful
As a great collector of all things Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson and Sissinghurst, I leapt on this book as it appeared. But did I really need it? Surely I have read everything printed about Sissinghurst, Vita and Harold, and visited the garden twice, what could it give me? Well for a start Adam Nicolson writes with more facility, imagination and poetry than either of his famous grand parents. A poetic grace, so beautifully expressed, that Vita would have killed to have had. Yes this is prose and not poetry, but Nicolson, like Virginia Woolf can make prose sound like poetry. In this book Nicolson re-examines Sissinghurst from its historic beginnings, to its "decline" to a tourist attraction. His dealings with the National Trust are fascinating, and believable. I found touching his writing of his father, Nigel, Harold and Vita's second son. Nigel, as a son of a most unconventional marriage, it is no wonder his world was really quite dysfunctional. I rather think the conservative Vita, Harold and Nigel would rather be alarmed at what most of Adam has written. For this reason the book is fascinating.
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