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Hiraeth by Huw Jones  [message #72062] Tue, 01 November 2016 18:42 Go to next message
solsticeman is currently offline  solsticeman

Likes it here

Registered: November 2012
Messages: 109



Hiraeth is a Welsh word that means a great deal to a Welshman.

It means a nostalgic longing... for the hills and the language, for times past and times lost.

In this case it means a longing for when times were perfect, with family and friends, brothers and sisters.

If I tell you that the story is set initially in Aberfan, in the Welsh mining valleys and in the late 1960s then you should get a cold feeling down the back of your neck.

I believe this story to not only be excellent and entrancing... it's also sociologically important. To know how important I would need to know Huw better, but accept it as just my opinion... this story really matters.

I'm glad he didn't listen to the idiot who tried to persuade him that the subject made it a story that shouldn't be written.

What he has written is utterly magic. Time and place, fear and love... and a longing for childhood and the hills... Hiraeth!

[Updated on: Tue, 01 November 2016 18:44]

Re: Hiraeth by Huw Jones  [message #72063 is a reply to message #72062] Tue, 01 November 2016 19:51 Go to previous message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13739



I have never believed a topic to be taboo for treatment in a well crafted story. How anyone could have attempted to discourage this tale is beyond me.

It's here much later than it ought to be. I had lost it. Perhaps it was meant to be that way, with the anniversary of a spoil heap's engulfing a school being prominent this year. That spoil heap affected the nation, not just Wales, though especially Wales.



Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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