On the Black Hill

A Novel

By: Bruce Chatwin

Narrated by: Simon Mattacks

Whitbread Award Winner: A novel by the author of In Patagonia, about a pair of twins and their long, remarkable lives in the farmlands of Wales.

For forty-two years, identical twins Lewis and Benjamin Jones have shared a bed, a farm, and a life. But the world has scarred and warped them each in different ways. Lewis is sturdy, still strong enough at eighty to wield an ax all day, and though he's hardly ever ventured outside his little village on the English border, he dreams of far-off lands. Benjamin is gentler, a cook whose favorite task is delivering baby lambs, and even in his old age, he remains devoted to the memory of his mother.

The unusual twins have seen a country change and an empire fall, and in their shared memory lies an epic story of the century that remade Britain. From the stories of their father's youth to their own dotage, there is nothing these farmers haven't seen - or heard.

Famed travel author Bruce Chatwin brings his unique understanding of landscape and culture to his debut novel, an intense examination of a little patch of Wales. Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Whitbread Literary Award, and written in the tradition of Wuthering Heights and The Mayor of Casterbridge, this entry on the list of "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" is an all-time classic from the author of bestsellers such as In Patagonia and The Songlines.

©1982 Bruce Chatwin (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. The author and publisher are grateful to Faber and Faber for permission to print lines from Ezra Pound's version of "Exile’s Letter", from Selected Poems 1908–1959, 1975.

I Enjoyed This very much!

Beautifully written story about the quiet lives of a pair of identical male twins, living in very rural Whales, beginning with their birth in the late 1800’s through their elderly years in the mid-1970’s. It starts out a bit slow in the beginning, but then draws you in more and more. I found myself becoming quite attached to the twins themselves as well as their world around them. SO different from our world today! The narrator does a really fantastic job!