Richard Llewellyn |  Fiction

How Green Was My Valley is a 1939 novel about the Morgans, a respectable Welsh mining family of the South Wales Valleys, through the eyes of one of the sons, Huw Morgan. Huw, and his five brothers and three sisters, grow up in a mining community, and face the challenges of an unregulated and unsafe industry.

I quite enjoyed this book, not only for the story of the mines and the mining culture and community, but also for Llewellyn’s ability to portray the inner qualities, thoughts, values, and feelings of the most important characters, the Morgan children and parents.  It tells a rich story of who the Morgans were, at that particular time and place.  The author also uses beautiful language about the land as well as the people, in an interesting mix of Welsh phraseology translated into English.

It is fun to read a classic novel in book club, as we do once a year.  How Green Was My Valley is long, but it tells a good story and also communicates much in about life and language of life in Wales nearly a century ago. It is definitely worth a read or a re-read.