'I remember, too, the light on the slopes, long shadows in tufts and hollows, with cattle, brilliant as painted china, treading their echoing shapes' Cider With Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of Laurie Lee's childhood and youth in a remote Cotswold village. From the moment he is set down in the long grass, 'thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers', he depicts a word that is both tangibly real yet belonging to a now distant past.