Dandelion Wine

Dandelion Wine is the most nakedly autobiographical book Bradbury ever wrote. Its twelve-year-old hero Douglas Spaulding is Bradbury himself, growing up in Waukegan, Illinois in the summer of 1928, and the novel is less a plot than a series of epiphanies: the moment Douglas realises he is alive, the moment he understands that people die, the moment he grasps that summer will end.

The book grew from a discipline Bradbury set himself: each morning he would write down everything he remembered from his childhood, one memory per day, one story per memory. The result is a book saturated in sensory detail, in the smell of cut grass and the taste of cold lemonade, in the particular quality of light on a Midwestern afternoon in July.

Dandelion wine, Douglas explains, is summer caught and bottled, preserved against the coming cold. The novel is Bradbury doing the same thing with memory itself. It is a book about the terror of time and the only weapon we have against it: paying attention.