The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre

Madeleine Bunting Press Reviews

'Madeleine Bunting's multidimensional chronicle is among the very best pieces of non-fiction to have been published in a long while about what it is like to be English'
Simon Schama, Financial Times

'An intriguing and elegant chronicle of a wild and woolly patch of England - Bunting is on finest form dealing with recent history, particularly when she exposes the modern cultural myth of the rural idyllA and the very English idiocy of preserving this view while the environment dies. Her scholarship ultimately produces a persuasive argument for a more potent sense of place in rootless, mobile Britain'
Sunday Times

'Bunting's exploration of the relationships between place and people is wide-ranging, researched with great intelligence and richly supported by detail'
Guardian

'A startling, willed, one-off book - What she sets out to do is to look at the acre of land in the middle of nowhereA , with scholarly zest, until it becomes no longer a nowhere but a somewhere, known and minutely understood. She is an exemplary guide - Her greatest achievement is to work a single acre to produce a more general portrait of England - Above all, she questions what belonging is and discovers that it is about commitment rather than possessionA '
Observer