James Tait Black Memorial Prizes
The Valley: A Hundred Years in the Life of a Yorkshire Family
A family saga that follows a century of change in land, memory, and inheritance.
Work Information
The book maps a changing community through the shifting ties of a family across generations.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Published
- 2015-03-26
- Pages
- 544 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13 x 3.5 x 20.1 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781408831632
- ISBN-10
- 1408831635
- Price
- 1212 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Parenting & Families
'Wonderfully evocative ... Not for a heartbeat is there a false or faltering note as various life stories unfurl and conflate, invariably amid hardship and leading to heartbreak' The Times The close-knit villages of the Dearne Valley in Yorkshire were home to four generations of the Hollingworth family. Spanning Richard Benson’s great-grandmother Winnie’s ninety-two years in the valley, and drawing on years of historical research, interviews and anecdotes, The Valley lets us into generations of carousing and banter as the family’s attempts to build a better and fairer world for themselves meet sometimes with triumph, sometimes with bitter defeat. Against a backdrop of underground explosions, strikes and pit closures, these are unflinching, deeply personal stories of battles between the sexes in a man’s world sustained by strong women; of growing up, and the power of love and imagination to transform lives.
Richard Benson is the author of the number one bestseller The Farm , which was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in 2005 and a 2006 Richard and Judy Book Club choice. He was born in the Dearne Valley in South Yorkshire, and lives in London with his wife and two daughters.
Reviews
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This beautifully written book is a history of one family in a Yorkshire mining community. It succeeds as a social commentary and as a child growing up in the 60's there was lots I could identify with. Knowing what we do now about Thatcher and McGregor's plans for the British mining industry I found it hard time read the chapters dealing with the 1984 mine's strike without becoming angry at the Tory government for deliberately setting out to ruin the mining communities. Indeed you can see parallels today in the treatment of the steel producing towns by the present Tory government who don't understand what it means to be united around one dominant industry in an area, and don't care about the consequences for those communities when the mines and steel works close.
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Das Buch ist sehr gut - wie neu und hat. Es gibt auch eine Widmung von dem Schriftsteller auf der ersten Seite. Absolutely perfect.
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This is an outstanding account of a family over several generations in a mining district in Yorkshire. The author has an astonishing knack of making the reader feel present in the room with his characters, who are his own grandparents and great-grandparents. Such a moving story, sometimes painfully so.
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I found this interesting as I had a limited knowledge of the area and its people. I will recommend this book to my book club as it gives a recent social history that many of our members will recall.
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Have just finished reading this incredible book depicting the lives of the author's Yorkshire family over 100 years. Extremely well researched and sensitively written it was a joy to read - the parts about the miners strikes written from their perspective were a real revelation ! Highly recommended.