How Green Was My Valley

• Book ID: 126204553
• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 420 KB
• Category: Standards

✦ Synopsis

Winner of the 1940 National Book Award for Fiction.

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. How Green Was My Valley is truly a lost classic. Llewellyn could not have more beautifully recreated the long-gone world of 19th century Wales. It is a slow book to get into, and at first it seems to be a shallow excercise in nostalgia. But the undercurrents soon appear, of politics and family tensions, that will grow and evolve throughout the course of the book. Yet though the idyllic landscape of Huw Morgan's childhood is perhaps doomed from the outset, he - looking back on this time as an old man - can both appreciate his days with an adult's hindsight, and also through the eyes of his younger self. The latter aspect is what makes this book a classic. No novel quite captures what it is like to be a child so well. Aspects of the young Huw's character - his occasional arrogance, his fascination with mundane things - make sense when we consider what we were like at his age. But what is really astounding is how the excitement, joy, innocence and love of childhood are recreated by Llewellyn - when he writes of the sound of Welsh voices echoing round the valleys, it is as vivid as one of your own cherished childhood memories. However, Llewellyn is not merely dabbling in nostalgia. He portrays Huw growing up, and the mixture of bitter disappointments and greater joys and responsibilities this brings.

✦ Subjects

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