Paperback, Pocket Classics series, Alan Sutton, 1998.
Book condition: spine is creased but unbroken, and generally a very nice copy.

Volume 10 in the 15-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight series.

The publisher's blurb for the first edition (1962) states: 'What is a young man to do when his wife dies and leaves him with a baby son, a cat, a dog, and an otter cub? How does he uphold himself in deepest grief? How can he, in the words of one of his literary heroes, Joseph Conrad, "learn to submit"?

'Phillip Maddison experiences such a tragedy after but a year of married happiness. The otter, her pet, goes wild when released from a rabbit gin. Thereafter Phillip's life is dedicated to search along the riverways and upon the moors of the West Country, in the hope that only if he finds Lutra again will he be able to find new happiness.

'The search culminates one summer day when the otter is hunted by hounds to the point of exhaustion. On that day Phillip finds his courage again through direct action, which leads to the hope of a new life with Lucy Copleston and her delightful family of three brothers and an old father. Before him now there opens the prospect of farming the land which he first knew in boyhood.'

(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's It Was The Nightingale.)