How Green Was My Valley

Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan was 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 beautiful 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.

"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. I have not read another novel which 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". (Richard Magrath)

"Philip Madoc is the perfect choice to give a reading of this marvellous novel. Having a Welsh narrator gives an authenticity and a strong sense of place, and being a fabulous actor you get a reading conveying all the pathos, passions and joys of the characters. The writing, and the performance are so fine it would be a sad thing not to enjoy the entire audio book in this the unabridged version". (Sacha)

''The reader emerges from these tense pages strangely aglow with sharing the happiness of the characters . . . The simplicity of the language and its delicately strange flavor give the book added charm.'' –Chicago Tribune

''A story of exquisite distinction and vibrant interest; clear and strong as the music under the sky.'' – The New York Times Book Review

''It took me up and flung me beyond time and silence. All I did was listen. . . . You'll never be the same after Richard Llewellyn has worked his magic.'' –Los Angeles Times

''A beautiful story told in words which have Welsh music in them . . . a book which will live in the mind and memory of its readers.'' –Atlantic Monthly

About the Author
RICHARD LLEWELLYN (1906-1983), a Welsh novelist, was born in Hendon, England, in the county of Middlesex. Before World War II, he spent periods working in hotels, wrote a play, worked as a coal miner, and produced his best-known novel, How Green Was My Valley, as well as nineteen other novels. After the war he worked as a journalist, covering the Nuremberg Trials, and then as a screenwriter for MGM.