"Visit a vibrant and vivid past with two fabulous guides, one from the 18th century, and the other his seven-times-great great-grandson from today."
Thought-provoking, amusing, and moving, this heartfelt walk into the past beckons with intimacy and bursts with familiarity into our world today. Author Ian Marchant discovers a long forgotten relative Thomas Marchant and meets, greets, and grows to love him while reading his diary written between 1714-1728. This book called to me from the synopsis, it promises a profound viewing of a past life, to a time before industrialisation while connecting via a unique bond to the present, and it more than delivers. Ian Marchant writes with an expressive pen while detailing his ancestor, his way of life, and the Sussex countryside. On finding his relative was a Diarist he says: “And so I am in the extraordinary position of knowing what my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Thomas Marchant was doing on pretty much any given days 300 years ago”. We first meet Thom on the 16 March 1720 where he proclaims a wet day while the carthorses were shoed and he taught someone how to make an ox harness. On the same day in 2020, Ian’s own diary details the arrival of Coronavirus. While walking beside Thom he questions, comments, and compares our cycle of life and the mistakes we make, while also celebrating the joy of family and the natural world around us. One Fine Day is the most wonderful invitation to become a part of a conversation between two men born centuries apart, we’ve chosen it as a LoveReading Star Book and it comes with our hand-on-heart recommendation.
| Genres: |
European history |
