– PRE-ORDER | SHIPS IN APRIL –

By Richard Llewellyn

How Green Was My Valley is the story of the Morgan family. Set in late nineteenth-century Wales, in the days before the clean freshness of the Welsh valleys was blighted by coal dust and slag, the family’s story is told simply and lovingly by Huw Morgan, the youngest son. 

Like most families in their village, the Morgans are miners. Depending for their livelihood on the work of wrestling coal from the belly of the earth, they labor for the sake of family and faith, God and country, love and marriage, work and leisure—sustaining them and passing them on, father to son, mother to daughter.

But mining is dangerous work, the kind which can spark revolution. And against the disruptions of change, the bedrocks of life for Huw and his world demand defending. 

As Huw moves with humor and grace from heartbreak to happiness, from triumph to tragedy, he captures the tensions of life lived between mountain and valley, where evil thoughts and greediness go to war with decency and clear conscience, while a slag heap of darkness descends upon the good things and the right. 

An instant bestseller upon its publication in 1939, How Green Was My Valley has continued to delight readers with its unabashed appreciation of the things which make life worth living. Told with simplicity and quiet strength, Llewellyn’s masterpiece presents a story with “fear for none, true on the note, sharp at the edge, with a trill and a tremolo to make you frozen with wonderment to hear.”

Richard Llewellyn (1906–1983) was a British author of Welsh descent. His first and most famous novel, How Green Was My Valley, was published in 1939, winning the National Book Award the next year. A captain in the Welsh Guards during World War II, Llewellyn wrote twenty more novels after How Green Was My Valley as well as several successful mystery plays. 

* * *

Hardcover: 488pp.

ISBN: 978-1685954666

A BENE Book