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Featured Author

Fair Stood the Wind for France

HE Bates is our Featured Author for September. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two, Penguin is running a library promotion of six books about War, chosen by Reading Groups up and down the country. The selections include memoirs, novels and autobiography. Fair Stood the Wind for France was one of the books chosen. The promotion runs from June to November and there are posters about it in every library in the UK.

Herbert Ernest Bates was acclaimed by Graham Greene as one of the best short-story writers of the twentieth century. He was born in 1905 and lived in Rushden in Northamptonshire, attended Kettering Grammar School and found his first job as a junior reporter for the Northamptonshire Chronicle. He published his first novel The Two Sisters in 1926 which launched him on a prolific career. Many of his early novels are set in the towns and countryside of eastern Northamptonshire.

His works include volumes of stories, The Woman Who Had Imagination (1934), The Flying Goat (1939) and The Beauty of the Dead (1940) and novels The Fallow Land (1932), Love for Lydia (1952), and The Darling Buds of May (1958). Many of his novels were successfully televised. He also published three volumes of autobiography, The Vanished World (1969), The Blossoming World (1971) and The World in Ripeness (1972). Fair Stood the Wind for France was published in 1944, a year prior to the end of the Second World War.

Here are some reviews:

‘This is my favourite novel about love under the extreme conditions of war. A downed bomber in France, the danger of detection, the love of a woman, the story of true romance and the ability of two people to build such close, intimate, and wholly trusting bonds is beautifully described in truly well-written English. I am going to buy this book for my fiancée - I want her to see depicted that true love of a woman most can only dream about. I always hoped to find such trust and commitment, and in Bates' novel I find it described so beautifully.’ Amazon reviewer

‘I feel that its strong themes of love and redemption, set against the horrors of World War Two, still have relevance today. I plan to use the book to help pupils understand life in occupied France.’ Helen Moore, English teacher

‘Bates’s description is brilliant…I was so wrapped up in the book and caught by its suspense that I was oblivious to everything else around me.’ Sue Moore, Reader Development Librarian Northamptonshire Libraries.