Library of Wales: The Heyday in the Blood: No. 19 - Softcover

Geraint Goodwin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1905762836 ISBN 13: 9781905762835

Publisher: Parthian Books, 2008

The village of Tanygraig on the Welsh-English border is the setting for this passionate novel of love and its consequences. Beti, the beautiful and wilful daughter of a pub landlord, is pursued by two men: Llew, her aggressive, red-haired cousin, and Evan, the dreamy miller and would-be poet. She has to make a choice but it's not her future alone that depends on her decision. She and Tanygraig are positioned precariously on borders of class, nation, language, and changing times. In this enduring novel by Geraint Goodwin, first published in 1936, Wales is associated with tradition and stability, England connotes modernity and movement. Beti is conscious of living at a temporal border: 'The old way of things was ending; she had come at the end of one age and the beginning of another. Wales would be the last to go but it was going...'

Review:

It has filled me with a sense of seeing great talent trying its first flight, which I have not experienced since reading D.H Lawrence s The White Peacock. --Howard Spring

Explores issues of nationality, language and class with a humorous yet tragic story attached... --Buzz Magazine

It is a mystery why a minor masterpiece like The Heyday of the Blood has been overlooked. Alternately comic and touching, this beautifully-observed and poetic chronicle of rural life deserves to be as widely enjoyed as the novels of H E Bates, Laurie Lee and even Thomas Hardy. Set on the border between Wales and England in the years of the Depression, The Heyday of the Blood describes the changes being wrought by modernisation and the reactions of the idiosyncratic inhabitants, which range from capitulation to resistance via drunken pranks. It is also a poignant romance: will the beautiful Beti choose the dreamy poet or the fiery poacher? And how will her father, the rambunctious keeper of the Red Lion Inn, respond? --Paul Duerdan

About the Author:

Geraint Goodwin was born in Wales in 1903. He started writing at an early age, his first success being at a local eisteddfod. As a young man he made his living as a journalist in London, where he wrote his first book Conversations with George Moore, and followed it with Call Back Yesterday. It was not, however, until he reached the age of thirty-two that he published his first work of fiction. The Heyday in the Bloodmade a considerable impression on the critics, and its author was hailed as a second Thomas Hardy. His untimely death in 1941 brought to an end a brilliant literary career which had barely time to begin.

• Publisher: Parthian Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1905762836
• ISBN 13: 9781905762835
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 270