Another book that left to my own devises I probably wouldn't have read, let alone bought. Sometimes you need a good friend's recommendation to get you started. Part truth part fiction, full of tragedy and love, twists and revelations, and some of the most beautifully descriptive writing I've read in a long time! With such powerful narration in the English translation, I have no doubt that in her native Welsh language the beautiful prose would have been breathtaking! A story that will stay with me for a very long time.....like all good stories do. ( )

This is a book with consistently wonderful reviews. Nine out of the ten reviews on Amazon give it five stars (the other one gives in four): marvellous, wonderful, incredible are only some of the superlatives used. The Independent says it 'stands tall ... as a peak of modern British writing'; the Literary Review calls it 'marvellous'; World Literature Today says that 'Price's lyrical prose breathes an almost magical life into the narrative'. I honestly can't find a single bad review, not even one that's luke-warm. And I have looked because ... I don't like it that much.
I feel that I have missed something magical which everyone else can see, as I really don't understand why this short novella (154 pages) should have gained quite so much acclamation.

This is a fictionalised account of the Jones family of the Maesglasau valley in mid-Wales, from 1903 when Evan Jones brought his new wife Rebecca back to the farm of Tynybraich, until the early years of the twenty-first century. Told through the eyes of their eldest daughter, also named Rebecca, the novella traces the life of the valley and its inhabitants throughout the twentieth century. And as well as the changes that necessarily come into the valley as time progresses, the lives of three of the Jones children are forced by a cruel circumstance far from their Welsh speaking non-conformist roots. For after the birth of their eldest son, the next two sons were born blind and a third lost his sight at a very young age. That meant a boarding school education from a very young age for all three boys, an education that was necessarily in English, and took the sons far from the lives of their parents in their outlook and values. And meant too that there was no money left for the education of the other children, so that the eldest son, who wanted more than anything to be a doctor, had no choice but to farm as his father has done before him.

The problem for me is that the book is so short and covers such a long period of time, that it often seems a mere listing of events, rather than investing those events with any emotional attachment. And although the descriptions are of the valley are beautiful, that isn't enough to make up for the lack of emotional attachment that I felt with the whole.

This is a novel, although its characters are all real people, and indeed the book is interspersed with photographs of the people and places mentioned.The nature of its fictional character is not revealed until right at the end in an unexpected twist. The author Angharad Price is the great granddaughter of Evan and Rebecca Jones, and is introduced briefly towards the end of the book. This was translated from the original Welsh, and it's another Welsh book where I feel something is lost in translation. But whereas the last one Feet in Chains was well worth the read despite that, I didn't feel the same for this. But as I say, this is clearly a minority view. ( )

Price has a gentle voice and is generous enough to let the reader do the filling in work; this is a whisper of a book. Originally in Cymraeg this now exists in parallel text thanks to a sensitive translation from Lloyd Jones (himself winner of the Welsh Book of the Year for Mr Cassini).
Price's family have farmed the same valley in mid Wales for a thousand years, this is a fictionalised account of life there over the last hundred years or so, but is much more than the sum those parts would seem to suggest.
An important book. ( )