Land of the Living – serie

This story of a child named Amy Parry follows her on a journey to maturity, when she will savour to the full the subtle flavours and rich textures of a way of life that has now all but vanished from the Principality of Wales.

This novel follows Flesh and Blood in the Amy Parry narrative sequence. Amy and Enid go together to university, where the former takes a leading part in the Nationalist campaign against Anglicization. Later Enid pairs off with John Cilydd More, a young solicitor who is also a poet, and Amy with Val Gwyn, an idealistic student leader. But Val dies of tuberculosis and Amy, in the post university world, falls prey to Pen Lewis, Communist and opportunist; Enid also dies. In this section of the narrative Amy loses her way: the props provided by other people's ideals and visions of society (the Communist one proving to be just another exploitation of women) having been removed she is empty of purpose.

Perhaps the key word of the 1930s was 'crisis'. The comfortable world of a bourgeois world had been declared shattered for ever by the Great War: and yet, between recurrent nightmares and dark forebodings for the future, every family continued its individual pursuit of an odd variety of bluebirds of happiness. The Prydderch family for instance, devoted to education and getting on, were very cross when Enid, their youngest and brightest, sacrificed her own promising career in order to marry John Cilydd More, a country solicitor, whom she believes to be a poet of great potential. Now she is pregant. Her aunt Sali Prydderch, particularly yearns for a reconciliation. She approaches Amy Parry, Enid's best friend who is now a County School teacher in the same North Wales seaside town. Salt of the Earth is the third in a sequence of novels which began with Flesh and Blood and The Best of Friends - a sequence which when completed, will have described the processes of growth, change and decay which have made Wales what it is today.

Amy Parry is bereft of her best friend who died in childbirth, unable to marry Val Gwyn who is seriously ill with TB, and determined not to choose poverty and struggle with her former lover Pen Lewis. So she marries John Cilydd More, but her peace is soon shattered by strikes and then Pen returns.

In this novel, Peredur defies both his mother's hostility and his brothers' lack of concern to seek out the truth of his father's death and to take part in a protest against the 1969 Investiture that goes violently wrong. Only at the end when Amy Parry faces death can reconciliation be achieved.

The 5th in a series, this work conveys the conflicts and passions of a small group of individuals in Wales, weighing them against the turmoil caused by war and its effects on a significantly changing Britain.