Penguin Audio dates this recording to 2009 and the text to 1959, according to the copyright line sitting at the foot of the description. The publisher field on this audiobook says Vintage Digital. The release date says March 16, 2011. The opening words of the description say Brought to you by Penguin. Three imprints and three years, all on one screen, none of them formally contradicting the others, which is precisely what makes the record so hard to use: a buyer has no way of telling which edition is being sold.
The Narrator Field Just Repeats the Author's Name
Laurie Lee wrote the book and the narrator field repeats his name. What that arrangement means in practice goes unstated, and with a text dated 1959 against a recording credited to 2009, a buyer is entitled to want it spelled out rather than inferred from a matching pair of fields. On a memoir written in the first person about the writer's own childhood, the question of whose voice delivers it is not a minor production footnote.
Grannies in the Wainscotting, and a Vanishing Village
Reviewers here are unusually good, which is not a sentence I get to write often. Five wrote in and four of them built an argument. The first calls it incredibly candid and lyrical, a memoir of his childhood and of a way of life that ended when the childhood did, and singles out the earliest memory of his sisters' faces surrounding him and the chapter about his mother as memorable, insightful and heart-wrenching. It also names the grannies in the wainscotting and the village as it was before the automobile finished off a secluded community.
Cotswold village life is the subject and the copy is exact about the period: a remote village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. What Lee depicts, the description says, is a world both immediate and real that already belongs to a now-distant past. Two of the entries make the same point in their own language, one describing a beautiful, strange historical period in a little known village in England where the way of life is about to disappear entirely.
Five Reviews Discuss the Prose, None the Reading
Sunday Times supplies the only pull-quote: it remains as fresh and full of joy and gratitude for youth and its sensations as when it first appeared, and it sings in the memory. Sings is the operative word for anyone weighing the audio edition, and it is also as close as this page comes to discussing sound. The line is about prose rhythm, was chosen decades ago for a printed jacket, and has been carried across to a recording listing without a syllable of adjustment.
Memoir at this pitch lives entirely on sentence rhythm, which is why the column here is more useful than most and still leaves the central question wide open. Five people wrote about the writing. Not one wrote about the reading. On most listings that absence is unremarkable and hardly worth a line. On a book whose whole reputation rests on how its prose sounds, and whose narrator field carries the author's own name, it is the single gap that matters.
Skimming is the recommendation of the most honest entry on the page, and it earns its place. Graded three stars and headed Merrie Olde England on its Last Legs, it reports starting out reading word for word and line for line, discovering that this did not work, growing bored enough to nearly abandon the book, and then skimming heavily, big time, which allowed the reader to carry on to the end. Lyrical and at times interesting, runs the verdict, and not as interesting as Laurie Lee imagined.
A Review Where Two Sentences Collide Mid-Word
England before the automobile is what that reader signed up for and did not get in the expected form, and the complaint transfers awkwardly into audio, because skimming is exactly what a recording refuses to permit. Seven hours and forty-nine minutes proceeds at whatever pace the reading sets. A listener who hits the same wall has a pause button and nothing else, which is worth setting against a memoir that at least one attentive reader found slow enough to need active management.
Whether the four-star entry counts as a review at all is arguable, and its physical condition raises a separate flag. It opens with a Daily Deal email and a blurb calling the book an instant classic when it was first published in 1959, wanders into the writer's years working in a book store, and then the text splices mid-thought: I'm at Cider With Rosieleast familiar with many more titles. Two sentences have collided inside the body, and the page displays the wreckage without comment or correction.
Someone should look hard at that 4.1, because no arithmetic builds it. The counter reads 4. Underneath it sit three fives, a four and a three, one of those fives carrying no headline at all. Four whole-star votes land on 4.0, on 4.25, on 4.5, on quarters and nothing else. 4.1 is not a quarter. Whatever produced the figure at the head of this record, it was not the handful of votes sitting beneath it, and the counter is short by one response into the bargain.
Read for the Sentences, Not for What Happens
Anyone who reads for prose rather than for plot is the audience, and this is one of the rare memoirs where that recommendation is precise instead of merely polite. Very little happens. A childhood in a village, a mother, sisters, school years, and a way of living quietly shutting down around all of them. That is the book, and its admirers here are unanimous that the sentences are the reason to stay rather than any question of what comes next. Listeners who responded to the language in the entries above, the grannies in the wainscotting, the earliest memory of faces around a bed, will find seven hours and forty-nine minutes generously stocked with exactly that.
Put this one back if you need narrative momentum, since the three-star reader tried it word for word, could not sustain the pace, and a recording offers no way to slide past a slow stretch. Leave it, too, when the edition question matters to you, because a 1959 text, a 2009 recording credit, a 2011 release date and two separate imprints all share this page without a word of reconciliation between them. Everyone else gets a small, exact, much-loved book about a vanished village. Put it down and come back to it, rather than pushing through in one sitting.
Who reads the Cider With Rosie audiobook?
The narrator field carries Laurie Lee, the same name as the author. The page never explains the arrangement, and the copyright line sets a 1959 text against a 2009 recording credit. For a first-person memoir about the writer's own childhood, that is the detail a buyer most wants confirmed.
Which edition of the audiobook is this, given the dates on the page?
Impossible to say from the record. The description opens with a Penguin credit and closes with a Penguin Audio date of 2009, the publisher field reads Vintage Digital, and the release date is March 16, 2011. Three imprints and three years appear with no reconciliation offered anywhere.
Does the memoir have a plot to follow?
Barely, and deliberately so. It is a childhood in a remote village before electricity or cars, told through sisters, a mother, school years and a community about to vanish. One reader graded it three stars precisely for that reason, reporting boredom until skimming became the only way through.
