Five books that capture the essence of The Cotswolds

The Cotswolds has one of the most buoyant literary scenes in the whole of England, past, present and (judging by new authors on the scene) future.

You could go right back to Jane Austen (start with Persuasion; you’ll find Bath within its almost-every page); through to JM Barrie (the Peter Pan author spent idyllic summers at Stanway House in the North Cotswolds); carry on with novelist Katie Fforde (Living Dangerously is a glorious evocation of Stroud); through to young authors such as Anna Bailey (Tall Bones might be set in America, but this exciting writer was brought up in Cheltenham). There’s plenty of fun in this particular ‘library’ (viz Old Herbaceous by Reginald Arkell); fantasy (Diana Setterfield’s Once Upon A River is a wonderful watery feat of imagination); to jewels of stories, such as Alice Jolly’s Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile.

And that’s hardly scratching the surface.

Now on to the region’s fabulous literary festivals. You can almost plan your year around them: Oxford, Chipping Norton, Bath children’s, Chipping Campden (plus many inbetween); and, perhaps the giant of them all, Cheltenham Literature each autumn.

One of the newest, and best, on the scene is Stroud Books Festival, each November, co-directed by Caroline Sanderson. A freelance editor and books journalist – as well as an author in her own right – Caroline has persuaded the great and the good to Stroud (one of the Sunday Times’s Best Places to Live in the UK).

We asked Caroline to nominate five favourite books set in the Cotswolds. And here’s her page-turning selection:

Riders, Jilly Cooper

You don’t have to know one end of a horse from the other to canter through this classic doorstop of a romance novel, first published in 1985, set in the Cotswolds and the steamy world of international showjumping. The first in Cooper’s marvellous Rutshire Chronicles, it introduces us to the dastardly Rupert Campbell-Black, a magnificent bounder you will love to hate, along with a host of other larger-than-life characters. Cooper’s latest blockbuster “Tackle” – out this autumn - finds our now slightly older hero Campbell-Black buying a football club, rumoured to be inspired by real Gloucestershire club, Forest Green Rovers.

A Thousand Laurie Lees, Adam Horovitz

Laurie Lee, renowned poet and author of “Cider with Rosie” describing his valley childhood in the Gloucestershire village of Slad, is perhaps the quintessential Cotswolds author. Published for the centenary of Lee’s birth in 2014, this illuminating book by Gloucestershire poet Horovitz explores how the glorious landscape informed the man and his writing. The title was inspired by an event shortly after Lee’s death in 1997, when a band of locals dressed up as the author and cycled through the heart of Cider with Rosie country, stopping off at all the pubs on the way. They called their journey: The Night of a Thousand Laurie Lees.

Stay, Jane Bailey

All Bailey’s novels vividly evoke her native Cotswold countryside, but perhaps never more darkly so than in this latest thriller. One summer, betrayed by her best friend and her boyfriend, Caitlin finds herself hitchhiking home alone. When a smiling family pulls up on the roadside, they seem so friendly and safe. And when they offer her a warm bed in their isolated house for the night, she finds herself taking them up on their offer. Little does she realise it’s the beginning of a nightmare. Claustrophobic, creepy, heart-in-mouth perilous and - as with any Bailey novel - some superbly drawn child characters.

Best Murder in Show: A Sophie Sayers Cozy Mystery, Debbie Young

Late, lamented Gloucestershire author MC Beaton helped establish a grand tradition of Cotswold-set cosy crime mysteries, thanks to her series of books featuring amateur detective Agatha Raisin. (Who could resist a title like “Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death”?) Now another local author, Debbie Young, has taken up the baton. The first novel in her Sophie Sayers series introduces the title character as she inherits a cottage in the sleepy Cotswold village of Wendlebury Barrow. There she hopes to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. Instead she encounters a dead body on a carnival float, an assortment of suspects, and a murder that needs solving.

Bertie, May & Mrs Fish, Xandra Bingley

What’s brilliant about this transporting memoir of the author’s wartime Cotswold childhood is that it captures both the idyllic countryside we enjoy in this most beautiful part of the world, and the generations of toil that lie behind its lush fields and chocolate-box cottages. With her father Bertie away at war, Bingley’s mother May is left to work the land on their isolated farm, assisted by an eccentric cast of characters, including tearful pregnant landgirls, homesick prisoners of war, and the gin-fond Mrs Fish. A wonderfully evocative portrait of a country childhood, and the courage and resilience of ordinary people.