Amy and Lan: The enchanting new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Outcast

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Initially I found it quite difficult to follow and without any direction, one chapter being written as ‘Lan’ , the next as ‘Amy’, which made it a bit more difficult to follow which parents/family belonged to which child, but it’s worth persevering with. No one conjures the magic of place like Sadie Jones ... A beautiful, haunting novel about the limits of love and the loss of innocence' Clare Clark

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? I loved Amy and Lan... I've long been a Sadie Jones fan but this may be her best yet . Poignant , compelling and brilliant ' Mary Lawson, author of A Town Called Solace It is through their eyes that we learn about life on the commune. Not just the daily tasks but the personal tensions. Amy and Lan occupy a privileged zone: those younger than them are the “little kids”, their elders “the grown-ups”. They observe both, often literally from a perch high on the barn roof. They are not naïve and do notice things. They do not look through a glass darkly but make astute and shared assessments of their parents and other adults. I was irritated by many of the adults who were so engrossed in their own lives that the children ran wild in dirty clothes and missing school.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The descriptions of the land,weather and farming tasks were vivid and well written.I had to skip over the many passages describing the inevitable sad endings for many of

I finished ‘Amy and Lan’ wanting to know how they adapted/enjoyed/survived the next ten years of their lives. Will there be a sequel? The chapters alternate between Lan’s voice and Amy’s. It takes a bit of getting used to. Working out who belongs to each child and who the others were took me a long time. They are definitely childish voices, with childish interests. We get clues to what are the issues with the adults through their childish observations, which they patently do not understand. Lan says that Amy never thinks that her mum ’might just go off one day’, which is a hint at what his mum has already done and so might do again. He catches his mum and Amy’s Dad kissing and ‘it wasn’t a love kiss because they aren’t married’. He dismisses it because he does not understand. It took me sometime to get into the flow of reading this book, perhaps the build-up of the story line was a bit slow for me! But the last third of it, the move/ the parting was quite gripping and made me emotional.

Featured Reviews

Amy and Lan live on a communal farm in Herefordshire, their parents having taken a leap in the dark just before they were born. They came into the world and Frith, the farm, just days apart. So, they are kind of twins, but not brother and sister. The story is told by them alternately from 2005 when they turn 7 to the cusp of adolescence. So not [quite]a coming-of-age. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Amy Connell and Lan Honey are having the best childhood, growing up on a West Country farm - three families, a couple of lodgers, goats, dogs and an orphaned calf called Gabriella Christmas. Jones's evocation of childhood is spot-on- its fierce passions, disaffections, loyalties and suffering' Financial TimesIt is a bitter-sweet read. They experience life in a thrilling vivid way that only children can. You would wish it would remain in their hearts forever. But by 2010 they too are beginning to grow up. You feel it will be but a faint memory for them both. It was interesting reading children’s perspectives of living in a hippy commune farm; although I have to say I was not entirely convinced by Lan’s and Amy’s voices. I absolutely adored this book, I loved that it was told from a child’s perspective, really gave it an edge. It just goes to show that children are more astute than we give them credit for. Amy Connell and Lan Honey are having the best childhood. When their families make the leap from city living to a farm in the West Country they have untold freedom. The adults are far too busy to keep an eye on them, and Amy and Lan would never tell them about climbing on the high barn roof, or what happened with the axe that time, any more than their parents would tell them the things they get up to. Adult things, like betrayal, that threaten to bring the whole fragile idyll tumbling down... Not much seemed to happen but there was a feeling that something would. The friendship between Amy & Lan is poignant, but doomed. I did like the parts where Lan finds joy in small things, and when he explained that the past and present are real but not the future. Sometimes hard to work out which of the children was narrating the story, which couples were together and who their children were.

It was not credible that the supposedly feisty Harriet would allow her husband and best friend to conduct an affair for five years without taking any action. It is narrated by two of the children, Amy and Lan, who are both aged seven. This device did not work for me as their voices and perceptions were largely indistinguishable so it served no purpose. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Some of the recollections highlighted how wild and dangerous childhood can be, especially without the supervision of adults. I am not sure that Amy and Lan have distinctive voices, but perhaps they just wouldn’t. Nor is there an obvious development in their world view until they move to secondary school – but again maybe there wouldn’t be. It is not to be read as a comment on the viability of communal living – there being at least as much good as bad in Frith. Good and bad in all things and everyone.The main characters were stereo typed with a token Asian woman and young man with mental health issues. Visitors from the city were uniformly ignorant, condescending and shallow.I did not engage with any of the people described in the book and found it hard to picture them except in very general terms. Adam, in my opinion,was the only one who was not one dimensional. This is one of my favourite books this year. I loved the story of these two children and their families living on a farm. I was caught up in the lives of them all and enjoyed the self sufficiency of the farm. I felt like I knew these people and the ending made me feel emotional. The adults are far too busy to keep an eye on Amy and Lan, and Amy and Lan would never tell them about climbing on the high barn roof, or what happened with the axe that time, any more than their parents would tell them the things they get up to - adult things, like betrayal - that threaten to bring the whole fragile idyll tumbling down...