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‘Emma Smith has written a book that should - and I hope does - endure as a classic among memoirs of childhood. I savoured every page' - Miranda Seymour, Evening Standard
‘A wonderful book, full of unexpected effects, and I suspect that it will become a classic of the genre ... so sincerely compassionate that I honestly can't read it without weeping' - Lynne Truss, Sunday Times
‘Evocative, witty and profoundly moving' - Daily Telegraph
'Deserves to become an overnight classic and to find a home at holiday cottage bedsides from St. Ives to Great Yarmouth' - Patrick Gale, author of Notes on an Exhibition
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The Great Western Beach is Emma Smith's wonderfully atmospheric memoir of a 1920s childhood in Newquay, Cornwall.
She recalls the rocks, the sea, the beaches, the picnics, the teas and pasties, the bracing walks, the tennis tournaments and bathing parties, the curious residents and fascinating holiday-makers - relishing every glorious, salty detail.
But above all this is a portrait of a family from the astonishingly clear-eyed perspective of a nine-year-old girl: her furious, frustrated father, perpetually on his way to becoming a world famous artist but suffering the indignity of being a lowly bank clerk; her beautiful, unperceptive mother, made for better things perhaps but at least, with three fiancés killed in the Great War, married with children at last; the twins, fearless, defiant Pam and sickly, bewildered Jim, for whom life is always an uphill climb, and baby Harvey, brought on the same winds of change that mean that life, with all its complication and wonder, cannot stay still and the Cornish playground of Emma's childhood will one day be lost forever.
