Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
Things Found on the Mountain
Things Found on the Mountain
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Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
Daw newid i gymoedd anghysbell y Mynyddoedd Duon, ond pa fath o fywyd fydd yno o hyn allan, ac i'r ferch alarus, Beth, sy'n blentyn natur? Pan gyrhaedda cymuned o artistiaid, yn cynnwys Gabriel, yr ardal, bydd Beth yn dysgu sut i gofleidio newid, cyn gorfod gwneud dewis calon-rwygol pan ddychwela'r artistiaid i Loegr. Beth fydd ei dewis? Y mynydd neu Gabriel?
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
Change intrudes into the remote valleys of the Black Mountains. What will happen to life there, and to grieving farmer's daughter Beth, a child of nature? When a colony of artists arrives, among them Gabriel, Beth learns to embrace change, only to be faced with a heart-wrenching choice when the artists move to England. The mountain, or Gabriel?
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9781781727188
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9781781727188
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- Things Found on the Mountain
- Awdur / Author
- Powell, Diana
- Current Price ex VAT
- £9.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £9.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Available
- Availability Status (CY)
- Ar gael
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2023-05-26
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Seren
- Media Type (EN)
- Paperback / softback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr meddal
- Pages
- 148 pages
- Size
- 135 × 208 mm; depth 10 mm
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Nofelau a Storïau ar Gyfer Oedolion (yn Saesneg) | EN: Adult Fiction and Stories (in English)
- Is-gategori / Subcategory
- CY: Ffuglen Lenyddol a Chyffredinol (yn Saesneg) | EN: General and Literary Fiction (in English)
Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography
Diana Powell was born in Llanelli and read English at Aberystywth. She lives now in Pembrokeshire. She won the Allen Raine Short Story Award in 2013 and the Penfro Festival Short Story Competition the following year. Her novella, 'The Sisters of Cynvael', won the Cinnamon Press Literature award and will be published in 2024. Her stories have been shortlisted in several competitions. 'Whale-Watching' won the ChipLit Festival Prize, was runner up in the Society of Authors Tom-Gallon award and featured in Best Short Stories 2020. Powell also won the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2022. A novella, 'Esther Bligh', was published by Holland House in 2018 and a story collection, 'Trouble Crossing the Bridge', by Chaffinch in 2020. Powell read at the Llangwm and Abergavenny festivals in 2022.
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
That Diana Powell is an award-winning short-story writer does not come as a surprise after reading this novel. It has the intense focus on a single mind (through which we learn the story) often found in short fiction. It is an unusual mind whose view of the outside world, and interaction with it, is almost entirely instinctual, almost non-human. The story is set in the 1910s and 20s, on Y Ffwddog above Capel-y-Ffin, where Beth, her brother Daniel and their parents have a sheep farm. Daniel and his sister know ‘their’ mountain and all its various and varied valleys intimately, including the Grwyne, and Daniel teaches Beth that all that matters is the air, water, stone and the living things of the mountain. He tries to teach her to read but she cannot learn. Their mountain is invaded by work beginning on a reservoir in the Grwyne (against which Daniel and later Beth do some sabotage). This invasion is halted by the war, but Daniel joins the army and is lost in France. Beth’s mother retreats into constant prayer, though Beth rejects the God of the Bible. Her father keeps the farm going but she spends all her time with their sheep on the mountain and, apart from her usual chores, does not seem to need or relate to her parents. Most of the book concerns Beth’s reaction to Daniel’s loss and to the subsequent invasions of her mountain, first by the reservoir builders and then by the family and associates of Eric Gill, who arrive and settle in Capel-y-Ffin for several years. Unlike A. S. Byatt’s fictionalised version of the group in The Children’s Book , Powell uses the actual characters and known events (perhaps drawing on Jonathan Miles’s Try the Wilderness First: Eric Gill and David Jones at Capel-y-Ffin , also published by Seren). Despite the Gill family’s friendliness to her, Beth regards them as noisy aliens – rather like an invasive species on ‘her’ land. She instinctively mistrusts Gill but likes David Jones, the quiet, war-haunted painter. Later she falls in love with another artist, but she has no conception of what they are doing: art has no meaning for her. The title is ambiguous: it might refer to Daniel’s catalogue – air, stone, water – but it also suggests that in Beth’s view other humans are ‘things’ whose purposes are a mystery to her compared with the elemental mountain and her sheep. The broken syntax of the first few pages mirrors Beth’s hesitant, childish speech and, thereafter, constructions suggest the nature of her experience: fluent when describing the natural world and sounds that ‘belonged’, but often broken and conflicted in her encounter with the aliens or with a concept beyond her narrow experience. She passionately expresses her hatred of those who have ‘killed’ the Grwyne but never begins to understand the value of the reservoir, which to so many was an occasion for joy. The novel recounts a clash of cultures and values typical of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries’ rural experience, but the nature of the central character and observer means that the novel avoids both easy romanticism and the triumph of ‘progress’.
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