"An intimate and generous book sharing the author’s love for his father and their combined appreciation for their allotments, this speaks of grief, growing, family, and love."
A beautiful melded mix of a monthly allotment diary, memoir of grief, and celebration of growing, love, and fatherhood. The author, Thom Eagle, is a writer, chef and fermenter, his book First Catch, won the Fortnum & Mason Debut Food Book 2019.
While the author says his first private draft of The Allotment Diaries, the account of his first and his father’s last year on the allotment, was brutal and potentially a form of catharsis after his father’s death, it is absolutely clear that every page is imbued with the essence of his father who kept an allotment plot for forty years and died in 2023.
Grief is full yet also fractured as the author speaks of: “the heart howls”and “paint the easy wisdom of the grief memoir over with red rage”.
Then, as the author explains: “I settle into a process, decide that for each chapter I will look a what I wrote that month, at what you wrote that month, at photographs of what I cooked and what was happening here in the soil and then I will simply write - write each month back into being, write you back into life -“ and from that very moment my own heart a mass of aching hurt, I fell deeply into the pages and read, at one with the eloquence and honesty.
As the months pass, plants grow, memories are remembered, dishes are cooked, photos are viewed, ingredients obsessed over, blog posts read, earth is tended, feelings are voiced and emotions are close to the surface. The Allotment Diaries, a book of remembrance and growing, is both incredibly intimate and generous as it speaks from the heart of the author.
February produces an abundance of leeks; May brings forth the first spears of asparagus. June's courgettes demand endless recipes; August's blight strikes the tomatoes. October sees beans soaking in home-made broth, red wine and barley. December's branches 'die back', yet life still stirs under the soil.
February produces an abundance of leeks; May brings forth the first spears of asparagus. June's courgettes demand endless recipes; August's blight strikes the tomatoes.
The Allotment Diaries features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, Cookery, Food and Drink, Gardening, Lifestyle, Hobbies and Leisure, Gardening: fruit and vegetable, Yearbooks, annuals, almanacs, Cookery / food by ingredient: fruit and vegetables, Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss, Allotments / Community gardens, Fiction, Fiction: narrative themes, Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss, Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary subjects, Encyclopaedias and reference works, Reference works, Yearbooks, annuals, almanacs, Cookery, Food and Drink, Cookery / food by ingredient, Cookery / food by ingredient: fruit and vegetables, Gardening: plants and cultivation guides, Gardening: fruit and vegetable, Allotments / Community gardens, Memoirs
Hardback. £18.00, down from the £20.00 cover price. In Stock.
The Allotment Diaries was written by Thom Eagle and published by Fleet an imprint of Little, Brown
The Allotment Diaries has 224 pages
£18.00, reduced from £20.00. In Stock.
