Book description
On the Black Hill is an elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the twentieth century.
In depicting the…
Why read it?
1 author picked On the Black Hill as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I read this novel soon after returning from Wales where I was visiting on a writing fellowship. My experience of the country is contemporary while the book is set several decades in the past. But I found the references and nuances of life, society, politics, language, and religion familiar.
It is a beautiful study of realistic rural life without romanticizing it. Spanning nearly four generations and panning wide to take in the entire neighbourhood, it depicts history as lived experience. Be it late 21st century India or early 20th century Wales, ‘upended’ power dynamics in marriages in historically hierarchical societies…
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