Welsh Modern Classics – serie

An entrancing and highly unusual account of a journey to the ends of the earth in search of a dream.Imogen Herrad sets off in search of the descendants of the nineteenth-century colony of Welsh settlers in Patagonia, in the deep south of Argentina, and discovers that Welsh-speaking communities, proud of their heritage, still exist there today. She also discovers a country and a way of life hugely different from her European experience.Her explorations lead Herrad beyond the Welsh to discover the even more remarkable story of the Mapuche, Tehuelche and other indigenous tribes, who have suffered the all too familiar fate of colonised peoples. This unexpected direction gives Herrad a new perspective on her own life and those of others, as she ends her travels standing on a Patagonian hillside, part of an ancient Mapuche ceremony of the land.

In 1996 Elsa lies in hospital reflecting on a past full of contrasts of place, language and circumstances, of safety and danger, and the awakening and dying of love.Back in 1940, far from their west Wales home, Elsa and her first husband, Captain Tommy Jones, had lived the privileged colonial life of Allied civilian ex-patriots in Hong Kong, their experiences both interdependent and contrasting with those of the Chinese who serve them. While news of the war worsens Elsa loses her first child and fault-lines open in the marriage as she becomes aware of Tommy's increasing interest in another, more sophisticated woman. Then the Japanese soldiers arrive and the Europeans are herded into an internment camp, where the tensions between Elsa and Tommy increase. Later, the difficulties of adjustment to postwar life are subtly delineated, as Elsa, Tommy and their young daughter, Mari return from the Far East to Wales and a changing community.In this memorable first novel, inspired by the experiences of her great-aunt, Francesca Rhydderch explores with sensitivity and acuity the effects of wartime on an impulsive marriage and the evolving strengths and weaknesses of individuals in the face of crisis.

Radnorshire, a county rural and remote. The lives of its sparse population continue to be shaped by the wild landscape of valleys and mountains in ways that for Britain now lie in the past. Yet down the centuries Radnorshire has fascinated and inspired, as a place of contemplation, exploration, creation and retreat.In At the Bright Hem of God Peter J. Conradi examines both his own relationship with the place and responses to it by writers from Gerald of Wales, who passed through in 1176, to the present day. On the way he takes in fifteenth-century court poets; the metaphysicals Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne; the Romantic poets and Rousseau (who almost lived there and whose ideas did); diarist Francis Kilvert and his editor William Plomer; artist Eric Gill and poet David Jones; Bruce Chatwin, whose On the Black Hill is the most famous Radnorshire novel; and poets R.S. Thomas, Roland Mathias and Ruth Bidgood, the county's current remembrancer. The result is an astonishing account, a trip across landscapes and borders - physical, emotional and intellectual - the culmination of over forty years of visiting and living there.Conradi's perceptive narrative is complemented by superb ink drawings by the Radnorshire artist Simon Dorrell to produce a beautiful book, a love letter to a place still hidden from most of the country.