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Miss Read, the village school teacher, relates the events of one particular summer.

Eight children once carved their names on the trunk of the great copper beech tree which shades the schoolhouse in Shancarrig. Now those children are grown. They have different lives but it was the school that formed them.

Written when he was 25, LOVE AMONG THE CHICKENS launched P.G. Wodehouse's career as a novelist and introduced the world to Ukridge, one of his most extraordinary inventions. Robert McCrum's introduction shows how this fascinating early book holds within it so many of the themes which Wodehouse was to make his own.

With dreams of moving to a house by the sea haunting their every day, Milvern and his wife Michelle, owners of a riverside property in a small outback farming community, struggle with drought, friends, adversaries and the wrenchingly familiar rural cycle of despair and hope.