THESE WILD ENGLISH
I am England till I die! Mum's marching through towns with the EDL. Billy's in prison for armed robbery. I'm left with a holdall of family photos, trying to work out how the hell we got here.
' An unforgettable and moving portrait of working-class alienation that everyone should read - this will change the way you think about our country and its divisions. Raw, challenging and deeply touching - Wilding illuminates her family in all their complexity, against the divisive politics of our age. I read it in one sitting'
-- James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd's Life and English Pastoral
'A superb first-hand account of the splintering of a working-class rural family. Above all it is a clear-eyed portrait of Wilding's mother; a determined, passionate woman whose pride eventually curdled into resentment'-- Joel Budd, author of Underdogs
Utterly compelling. I couldn't put this down! These Wild English picks you up and takes you on a journey that will leave you changed. It is a book full of heart and hope and, even when that hope is dashed against a changing political backdrop, it is remade again and again, as we all must do in a world where we cannot always see the bigger picture -- Rebecca Smith, author of Rural
' A rich and tangled family history full of contradictions. This is a wild ride through a childhood of Angel Delight and Poll Tax Riots, scarred market towns and reviled barracks in Northern Ireland, intergenerational trauma and tough, fierce, wild women who just keep on getting back up' -- Jonathan Trigell, author of Boy A
THESE WILD ENGLISH is a tender, moving and richly complex portrait of a resilient working-class family in a changing country. Nicola Wilding explores a breakdown of community bonds, crises in the farming and social care sectors, and the appeal of the far right with rare courage and candour, blurring black-and-white narratives and refusing to provide simple answers. It is a testament to the thrilling messiness of human life and the eternal thirst for belonging -- Nicolas Padamsee, author of England is Mine
Every once and a while a book comes along that doesn't need to beg or plead to be read, because the moment you open the cover you know it's just too bloody good - These Wild English is that book. Our working-class experiences are not often documented, and when they are they are mostly by urban men, that is why this book by Nicola Wilding is such a refreshing surge of Cumbrian air, one minute warm and enticing, the next astonishingly brutal in its descriptions - Nicola has a poet's palette for minute detail and an artist's eye for the bigger picture, all brought together in a familial story as perfect as it is complex. Read it! -- Natasha Carthew, author of Undercurrent and Rough Edges
