The Path through the Trees

“In my first book, The Enchanted Places,” Christopher Milne writes in his preface, “I was writing about my childhood, saying what I needed to say about Pooh and Christopher Robin. The present book is in a way a sequel, starting where the other left off. But, rather more than that, it is a complement, it is about the non-Pooh part of my life. It is an escape from Christopher Robin.”

Everyone who grows up within a family experiences the need to outgrow parents and teachers, to make a way of life that is his own, and to create his own circle of friends and family—however large or small. As a young man, Christopher Milne found himself seeking his own path through life against a background of two central experiences. The first was being A. A. Milne’s son—which brought the peculiarly unique problem he describes so poignantly in his first book. The second was the war, in which he served in the Royal Engineers in North Africa and Italy. After the war, following some years of searching in London, Christopher Milne and his wife, Lesley, made their home and their career in Dartmouth, Devon, where they founded the Harbour Bookshop in 1951.

The Path through the Trees is a moving account of a young man’s search for his own identity. It offers a fascinating and affectionate account of a struggling (and later thriving) bookshop, and of the author’s own family life in a small English country town. The path its author chose has not led him to a mountain top but it has taken courage to follow and has clearly brought him happiness. His achievement in this book is to tell the story of this journey simply, vividly, and often humorously.

This audiobook is read by Peter Dennis, the actor who brought life to A. A. Milne’s Pooh stories and verses in various other works published by Blackstone Audio. A longtime friend of the Milne family, he made both this recording and The Enchanted Places as a gift for Clare Milne, Christopher Robin Milne’s only child.