On the Black Hill Chatwin, Bruce

From the Publisher:

Lewis and Benjamin Jones, identical twins, were born with the century on a farm on the English-Welsh border. For eighty years they live on the farm?sharing the same clothes, tilling the same soil, sleeping in the same bed. Their lives and the lives of their neighbors?farmers, drovers, clergymen, traders, coffin-makers?are only obliquely touched by the chaos of twentieth-century progress.

Nonetheless, the twins' world?a few square miles of Welsh countryside?is rich in the oddities, the wonders, and the tragedies of the human experience. In this extraordinary novel Bruce Chatwin has captured every nuance of the Welsh landscape and of the lives and souls of the people who lived there.

Annotation:
A chronicle of the odd and compelling lives of a pair of elderly, inseparable identical twins, Lewis and Benjamin Jones, who are sheep-farmers in rural Wales.

Author Bio

Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin, the complex and elusive travel writer and novelist, was born in 1940. He attended private schools in England "I was hopeless at school," he claimed) and began his career as a journalist, then became an appraiser for Sotheby's in London. He studied archaeology briefly in Edinburgh, but began writing about his travels in the 1970's; his first book was IN PATAGONIA, the very successful account of a trip to South America. He quickly became celebrated for his unusual, personal, and erudite travel writing--though Chatwin disliked being relegated to that particular slot. (He was also an accomplished novelist.) Chatwin, from all accounts, was a difficult, devious, gifted, flamboyant man who seemed to make friends and enemies in equal numbers. He was married, but lived a distinctly bisexual life, and his death, at the age of 49, was from the complications from AIDS--not from an obscure Chinese fungus, as he claimed in his last months.

Praise

New Yorker
"The author lays out this tale of country narrowness in a mosaic of wonderfully sharp and knowing small scenes. Though Mr. Chatwin was born in 1940, the details of daily life early in the century seem an open book to him." - John Updike 03/21/1983

BloomReach Content

On the Black Hill (Paperback)

Product Details:

Praise

Rakuten