One Moonlit Night
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
This autobiographical coming of age classic offers a "visceral, comic and tragic" portrait of rural life in Wales during the Great War (The Guardian, UK).
Named the greatest Welsh novel by the Wales Arts Review, this beautifully rendered novel tells of a boy's hardscrabble life in rural Wales and his challenging—yet at times transcendent—journey into adulthood. In the 1910s, the village of Bethesda is a place of poverty and religion; illness and hard labor. But by the light of a full moon our narrator and his friends Huw and Moi witness a side to their Welsh village life that they had no idea existed, and their innocence is exchanged for the shocking reality of the adult world.
"A remarkable book that recalls Under Milk Wood," One Moonlit Night is one of Britain's most significant and brilliant pieces of fiction, a lost contemporary classic that deserves rediscovery (Times Literary Supplement).
This edition of One Moonlit Night, "translated by Philip Mitchell in prose which miraculously conveys the incantatory biblical and Celtic cadences of the original," includes a foreword by Niall Griffiths and an afterword by Jan Morris (The Guardian, UK).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet-journalist Prichard (1904-1980) was born in the slate-quarrying town of Bethesda, in northwest Wales. His father died when he was five months old, and, when he was a teenager, Prichard took his mother to the Denbigh Mental Hospital. He left Bethesda to become a journalist, first at Caernarfon, then in Cardiff and finally, in 1936, in London, where he would remain until his death. In 1955, hard on the heels of Dylan Thomas's "radio play for voices" Under Milk Wood, Prichard started to write One Moonlit Night, planning a radio drama but eventually expanding it into a novel, first published in 1961 in the original Welsh. Narrated in the first person, Prichard's autobiographical portrait of a boy and his friends coming of age in a small Welsh village is set against a sprawling, shadowy tapestry of larger events-the unsuccessful 1900-1903 strike of Bethesda quarrymen, the 1904- 1905 quasi-religious revivals in Wales and WWI deprivations. At the core is the boy's relationship with his depressed, distraught mother and his empathy for her. Play outside might bring blood from a rock hidden in a snowball, but he sees such as only one minor event in his splintering, collapsing community. A sensitive soul rubbed raw, the boy recounts a turbulent flow of imaginative visions, anguish, death, madness, funerals and "the solitude of the night." Mitchell does a fine job of bringing Prichard's simple, lyrical prose to English and further helps readers of this first complete translation by providing a glossary of place names and notes on Welsh expletives and nicknames.
