People Of The Black Mountains Vol.I

This proud and haunting novel is the last great work of Raymond Harris, his final testament.

Here, in one vast, breathtaking sweep is his story of the land where he was born, the land he loved and left, but could never forget - the story of the people of Wales and the borders, not over one or two generations but many thousands, from the very beginning of recorded time.

People of the Black Mountainis a chronicle with a difference, alive with feeling, set within a night-long quest of a young man of today, searching for his grandfather lost on the high ridges. On the moonlit heights Glyn hears voices calling within him, voices which pull us back, over the rim of the years to the days of Marod and his family, sheltering in their caves and hunting horses in a misty Arctic summer. As Glyn follows the tracks the stories form a linking chain across the ages, from before the last Ice-Age to the fierce, defiant struggle against the invading Romans.

Lost lives, forgotten memories, like like the arrowheads beneath close-cropped turf. Myth and magic, plague and invasion, the warmth and sadness of daily life - slowly the waves of history ebb and flow, like the oceans which long ago formed the sandstone layers at the heart of the mountains themselves.

Rooted in the past yet written for the present,People of the Black Mountainsis a novel unlike any other, written by one of the great men of our time: a journey in search of a buried history, following the tracks on a map that all of us can read - and walk along - today.

Raymond Williamswas born in 1921 in the Welsh border village of Pandy, and was educated at the village school, at Abergavenny Grammar School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. After serving in the war as an anti-tank captain, he became an adult education tutor in the Oxford University Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies. In 1947 he was an editor ofPolitics and Letters, and in the 1960s was general editor of theNew Thinkers Library. He was elected Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1961 and was later appointed Professor of Drama.

His books includeCulture and Society(1958),The Long Revolution(1961) and its sequelTowards 2000(1983);Communications(1962) andTelevision: Technology and Cultural Form(1974);Drama in Performance(1954),Modern Tragedy(1966) andDrama from Ibsen to Brecht(1968);The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence(1970),Orwell(1971) andThe Country and the City(1973);Politics and Letters(interviews) (1979) andProblems in Materialism and Culture(selected essays) (1980); and four novels the Welsh trilogy ofBorder Country(1960),Second Generation(1964) andThe Fight for Manod(1979), andThe Volunteers(1978).

Raymond Williams was married in 1942, had three children, and divided his time between Saffron Walden, near Cambridge, and Wales. He died in 1988.