HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY

Huw Morgan tells the story of his life in a Welsh village, where everything is slowly destroyed by the coal mines—from the lives of the workers and their families to their very houses, which are being buried under heaps of mining slag. Llewellyn’s novel can make for difficult reading in the print version, with its unusual names and unfamiliar dialect. But Ralph Cosham’s gentle, straightforward narration makes the story easy to understand and even enhances the beautiful writing “so that the rich taste of magnificent English may come to the ears and go to the head like the perfumes of the Magi . . .”—to quote Llewellyn. Indelible descriptions of scenery, tastes, smells, and human behavior will have listeners rewinding, wanting to savor the experience again. M.M.G. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2011]