ISBN 978-0-9540924-2-9
Hardback, 384 pages, 135mm x 195mm
Published: December 2014
Carla Carlisle’s weekly column appeared on the back page of Country Life for 12 years. Her writing is admired as much for its wisdom as for its common sense, and she writes with wit, frankness and occasional gloom about the countryside and the world beyond, tethered to the belief that a thousand acres is not a gated community that can keep out the real world. 'A Thousand Acres' gathers together her best pieces since 'South Facing Slope' was published a decade ago, years filled with political extremity, memorials, celebrations, elegies and good dogs.
The author was born on the banks of the Yazoo River in Greenwood, Mississippi. Her childhood was divided between two farms: her maternal grandparents’ dairy farm in the red clay hills and her paternal grandparents’ cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. She dreamed of a world of paved sidewalks, and succeeded in living in New York, Paris and London before marrying a Suffolk farmer with 1000 acres of arable land nine miles north of Bury St Edmunds. In 1996 she began writing the back page column in Country Life. Short-listed for 'Columnist of the Year' (2011) and 'Writer of the Year' (2012), she managed to win the ‘East Anglian Wine of the Year’ (in 2011 and 2014).
