How Green Was My Valley

By Richard Llewellyn,

Book cover of How Green Was My Valley

Book description

All six episodes of the BBC adaptation of Richard Llewellyn's classic novel set in a Welsh mining community at the turn of the century. Gwilym (Stanley Baker) and Beth Morgan (Siân Phillips) work their hardest to provide for their children, but these are the years before the unions improved the…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked How Green Was My Valley as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book is a childhood favourite.

A touching and intimate account that brings me to tears every time I read it. I love how its simple narrative is infused with poetry and how you can hear the gentle Welsh lilt.

All this brings the story to life, and makes its hopes, joys, and tragedies so very poignant. 

Another book that features striking miners but, this time, set in Victorian Wales. It’s more fiction than autobiography, but I do believe in its portrayal of a family trying to deal with the change from Victorian values to more modern ones. The father clings to his belief in traditional forms of authority and in the power of prayer. The sons believe in unions and fighting for what they feel are workers’ rights. There’s more to How Green Was My Valley than that, but I felt I learnt something. It hadn’t occurred to me that the growth of unions could be…

From Jude's list on featuring the lives of coal miners.

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