The Life of the Fields

This book is about the people and the landscape of Andalusia at a specific time, in the middle of the last century, still recognisable, still to be found, despite the fact that Andalusia has seen so many changes in these past seventy years. The book was inspired by the landscape around the family home of the Spanish poet Jose Antonio Munoz Rojas (1909-2009) near the country town of Antequera in the province of Málaga. It is about the country house and farm, the Caseria del Conde, and the people who lived and worked there. But it has come to be seen as representing a whole epoch of rural Andalusia and is full of magical descriptions of the land and its people, their character and ways of life. The interest and regard the English have always shown for Andalusia is justification enough for bringing this most attractive book into our language.