A poignant coming-of-age novel set in a Welsh mining town, Richard Llewellyn''s How Green Was My Valley is a paean to a more innocent age, published in Penguin Modern Classics
Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons - at the kitchen table, at Chapel and around the pit-head. Looking back on the hardships of his early life, where difficult days are faced with courage but the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory. An immediate bestseller on publication in 1939, How Green Was My Valley quickly became one of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century. Poetic and nostalgic, it is an elegy to a lost world.
Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd (1906-1983), better known by his pen name Richard Llewellyn, claimed to have been born in St David''s, Pembrokeshire, Wales; after his death he was discovered to have been born of Welsh parents in Hendon, Middlesex. His famous first novel How Green Was My Valley (1939) was begun in St David''s from a draft he had written in India, and was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film by director John Ford. None But the Lonely Heart, his second novel, was published in 1943, and subsequently made into a film starring Cary Grant and Ethel Barrymore. As well as novels including Green, Green My Valley Now (1975) and I Stand on a Quiet Shore (1982), Llewellyn wrote two highly successful plays, Poison Pen and Noose
If you enjoyed How Green Was My Valley, you might like Barry Hines'' A Kestrel for a Knave, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.
''Vivid, eloquent, poetical, glowing with an inner flame of emotion''
The Times Literary Supplement
Industry Reviews
Here is a book deserving of wide attention,and destined, in my opinion, for an excellent press, but a slow pace of recognition. There is tremendous emotional power in the chronicle of a Welsh family, in a mining village which, back in the '80's and the '90's still flourished, and blossomed, with no slag-heaps to transform the mountain sides, no poverty stalking hunger through the land. The plot is no plot at all, in the conventional sense; here is where it may fail to appeal to popular taste. But in characterization, in vigorous scenes, in the picture of the everyday life of the family and the village, in tragic scenes and in festive ones, the book cuts deep into our hearts. It is a profoundly moving story, realistic and yet poignantly lyr??. There is something of the quality of Twenty Years A-Growing. There is a closeness to the soil - and the people - that suggests Mary Webb. There is a simplicity that makes it read like a peasant saga, and yet there is occasional over-playing of the heroic. The story is told by Huw, looking back from the vantage point of old age to the days of his youth, as one of a large family, when "green was my valley" - and his language is still tinged with the almost Biblical overtones of his people. Don't overlook this book; you can sell it to customers who will appreciate its rare quality. The publisher's enthusiasm and backing will start the ball rolling and may bring it the success it should get. (Kirkus Reviews)
