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I am not sure that Amy and Lan have distinctive voices, but perhaps they just wouldn’t. Nor is there an obvious development in their world view until they move to secondary school – but again maybe there wouldn’t be. It is not to be read as a comment on the viability of communal living – there being at least as much good as bad in Frith. Good and bad in all things and everyone. No one conjures the magic of place like Sadie Jones ... A beautiful, haunting novel about the limits of love and the loss of innocence' Clare Clark It is through their eyes that we learn about life on the commune. Not just the daily tasks but the personal tensions. Amy and Lan occupy a privileged zone: those younger than them are the “little kids”, their elders “the grown-ups”. They observe both, often literally from a perch high on the barn roof. They are not naïve and do notice things. They do not look through a glass darkly but make astute and shared assessments of their parents and other adults.

Amy Connell and Lan Honey are having the best childhood, growing up on a West Country farm - three families, a couple of lodgers, goats, dogs and an orphaned calf called Gabriella Christmas.

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A gently episodic and humorous tale whose sharp-eyed, effervescent child narrators entertain... Beguilingly readable' Daily Mail Gifted by Vintage and the Reading Agency* Amy and Lan is both an amusing and tragic presentation of rural life in the mid-late 2000s. Its two principal characters, Amy and Lan, provide a strong narrative voice for the plot. The story of Frith and the families that reside is told through the childish eyes of its two leads; trying to comprehend and navigate the complex dramas of the adults on the farm. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The descriptions of the land,weather and farming tasks were vivid and well written.I had to skip over the many passages describing the inevitable sad endings for many of

The chapters alternate between Lan’s voice and Amy’s. It takes a bit of getting used to. Working out who belongs to each child and who the others were took me a long time. They are definitely childish voices, with childish interests. We get clues to what are the issues with the adults through their childish observations, which they patently do not understand. Lan says that Amy never thinks that her mum ’might just go off one day’, which is a hint at what his mum has already done and so might do again. He catches his mum and Amy’s Dad kissing and ‘it wasn’t a love kiss because they aren’t married’. He dismisses it because he does not understand. It took me sometime to get into the flow of reading this book, perhaps the build-up of the story line was a bit slow for me! But the last third of it, the move/ the parting was quite gripping and made me emotional. It was not credible that the supposedly feisty Harriet would allow her husband and best friend to conduct an affair for five years without taking any action. How did the Simple Life get so complicated? A child's-eye view of family and rural life in the compelling new novel from Sadie Jones.

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The references to popular music helped to set the era and mood, it is easy to identify with particular songs evoking memories. Not much seemed to happen but there was a feeling that something would. The friendship between Amy & Lan is poignant, but doomed. I did like the parts where Lan finds joy in small things, and when he explained that the past and present are real but not the future. Sometimes hard to work out which of the children was narrating the story, which couples were together and who their children were. I loved Amy and Lan... I've long been a Sadie Jones fan but this may be her best yet . Poignant , compelling and brilliant ' Mary Lawson, author of A Town Called Solace The main characters were stereo typed with a token Asian woman and young man with mental health issues. Visitors from the city were uniformly ignorant, condescending and shallow.I did not engage with any of the people described in the book and found it hard to picture them except in very general terms. Adam, in my opinion,was the only one who was not one dimensional.

The adults are far too busy to keep an eye on Amy and Lan, and Amy and Lan would never tell them about climbing on the high barn roof, or what happened with the axe that time, any more than their parents would tell them the things they get up to - adult things, like betrayal - that threaten to bring the whole fragile idyll tumbling down...

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Initially I found it quite difficult to follow and without any direction, one chapter being written as ‘Lan’ , the next as ‘Amy’, which made it a bit more difficult to follow which parents/family belonged to which child, but it’s worth persevering with. It is a bitter-sweet read. They experience life in a thrilling vivid way that only children can. You would wish it would remain in their hearts forever. But by 2010 they too are beginning to grow up. You feel it will be but a faint memory for them both.