Most Popular Books by Richard Llewellyn

The international-bestselling winner of the National Book Award and the basis for the Academy Award–winning film directed by John Ford. Huw Morgan remembers the days when his home valley was prosperous, verdant, and beautiful—before the mines came to town. The youngest son of a respectable mining family in South Wales, he is now the only one left in the valley, and his reminiscences tell the story of a family and a town both defined and ruined by the mines. Huw’s story is both joyful and heartrending—a portrait of a place and a people existing now only in memory. Full of memorable characters, richly crafted language, and surprising humor, How Green Was My Valley is the first of four books chronicling Huw’s life, including the sequels Up into the Singing Mountain, Down Where the Moon is Small, and Green, Green My Valley Now. “The reader emerges from these tense pages strangely aglow with sharing the happiness of the characters . . . The simplicity of the language and its delicately strange flavor give the book added charm.” —Chicago Tribune

A poignant coming-of-age novel set in a Welsh mining town, Richard Llewellyn''s How Green Was My Valley is a paean to a more innocent age, published in Penguin Modern Classics Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons - at the kitchen table, at Chapel and around the pit-head. Looking back on the hardships of his early life, where difficult days are faced with courage but the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory. An immediate bestseller on publication in 1939, How Green Was My Valley quickly became one of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century. Poetic and nostalgic, it is an elegy to a lost world. Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd (1906-1983), better known by his pen name Richard Llewellyn, claimed to have been born in St David''s, Pembrokeshire, Wales; after his death he was discovered to have been born of Welsh parents in Hendon, Middlesex. His famous first novel How Green Was My Valley (1939) was begun in St David''s from a draft he had written in India, and was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film by director John Ford. None But the Lonely Heart, his second novel, was published in 1943, and subsequently made into a film starring Cary Grant and Ethel Barrymore. As well as novels including Green, Green My Valley Now (1975) and I Stand on a Quiet Shore (1982), Llewellyn wrote two highly successful plays, Poison Pen and Noose If you enjoyed How Green Was My Valley, you might like Barry Hines'' A Kestrel for a Knave, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. ''Vivid, eloquent, poetical, glowing with an inner flame of emotion'' The Times Literary Supplement

Story of a Welsh mining family.

Edmond Trothe, an undercover agent for Her Majesty''s Secret Service, becomes enmeshed in a shadowy world of high finance, international espionage and double agents from which there appears to be no escape.

Adventurous new life of Huw Morgan after he joins a pioneer colony of Welshmen in Patagonia.

Young ex-professor of history, in love with a wealthy young woman, tries to operate an amusement pier.

Beneath his cover as a career diplomat, British spy Edmund Trothe receives an assignment he can really sink his teeth into: infiltrate a neo-Nazi group in West Germany.

Nterenke seeks a way to lead his people, the Masai of Kenya, into the 20th century while remaining true to their heritage.

A young prince of Gaul is captured by the Romans and sent as a slave to the galleys for three years. After a daring escape, he makes his way to Herculaneum where he is involved in a plot to kidnap a beautiful vestal, made to fight lions in the arena, and caught in the struggle between the Dianists and the Christians.

When Lady Sarah returns to the Welch village of Merthyn, she finds a turmoil. Napoleon''s fleet is blocking the harbor while the English King''s Revenue Agents ransack the town, looking for smugglers.

Based on the case of Burgess and MacLean, the two British diplomats who fled behind the Iron Curtain in 1951.

Huw Morgan, gamin du Pays de Galles, pousse en graine dans une vallée hier encore ensauvagée où l''on a trouvé du charbon. Ici, tous les hommes sont à la fois paysans et mineurs. Autant dire que le garçon, malin comme il n''est pas permis, rebelle dans l''âme, ne tarde pas à comprendre que la vie est d''abord une contradiction. Sensible comme une harpe, rétif comme les chèvres sauvages, Huw perçoit tout et n''est pas loin de tout comprendre : le travail de plus en plus dur, de plus en plus dangereux ; les salaires sans cesse rattrapés par les prix ; les patrons pleins de morgue ; les ouvriers toujours prêts à tirer respectueusement leur bonnet sur le passage des nantis... Nul doute, il fera bientôt partie de ceux qui disent non, qui lèvent déjà l''étendard de la révolte. Précisons que nous sommes fort loin, ici, du roman à idées. Qu''elle était verte ma vallée ! n''est pas un Germinal anglo-saxon, mais l''un de ces récits racontés à hauteur d''homme où les sentiments semblent droit jaillis de la poitrine et du ventre. On comprend que le grand John Ford ait tenu à porter au cinéma cette histoire taillée dans le vif à francs coups de lame et qui vous laisse, après cinq cents pages, le cœur battant. Le succès de Qu''elle était verte ma vallée ! (1939) a un peu occulté le reste de l''œuvre de Richard Llewellyn (1906 - 1983), ce qui est peut-être injuste. Ce Gallois tourmenté par le démon de la bougeotte aimait au fond par-dessus tout ce coin de terre qui l''avait vu naître, et cet amour éclate ici à chaque page. Traduit en vingt langues, vendu à travers le monde à plusieurs millions d''exemplaires, Qu''elle était verte ma vallée ! incarne aujourd''hui, de façon presque emblématique, la révolte de la terre meurtrie par la folie des hommes.