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. Nevertheless, the twins' world--a few square miles of 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 live there.
The best of arts and classical music from the @BBC
It's A Sin star @callumshowells gives a performance reading of On the Black Hill - Bruce Chatwin's novel exploring unrequited love, sexual repression and confusion in rural 20th Century Britain - on @BBC Four & @BBCiPlayer tonight at 8pm: https://t.co/wCKxEQg4sv https://t.co/cRkjW907dt
Author of history fiction, thrillers and BBC TV docs. Latest book: The Prime Minister's Affair (Hodder) in paperback September 14
On the Black Hill. 'I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of walkers. If you walk hard enough you probably don't need any other God.' Bruce Chatwin #Bordercountry https://t.co/dxUvoCmdLf
"A masterpiece, a chronicle of ordinary lives told with extraordinary insight." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Scene after scene is brought to life with an enraptured attention that causes them to glow with an almost visionary light." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Remarkable...like a beautiful old quilt, made up of bright vivid patches, with scenes that surprise and delight and seem absolutely true."-- People
"A rare book, one of those splendid evocations of place made so justifiably famous by masters of the British novel in the past century: George Eliot, Hardy, Lawrence."-- Houston Post