On the Black Hill - by Bruce Chatwin (Paperback)

About the Book

An elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. In depicting the lives of the twins and their interactions with their small local community, Chatwin comments movingly on the larger questions of human experience.

Book Synopsis

The "spellbinding" (Los Angeles Times) second novel by the acclaimed author of The Songlines and In Patagonia

Lewis and Benjamin Jones, identical twins, were born with the century on a farm on the English-Welsh border. For eighty years they live on the farm--sharing the same clothes, tilling the same soil, sleeping in the same bed. Their lives and the lives of their neighbors--farmers, drovers, clergymen, traders, coffin-makers--are only obliquely touched by the chaos of twentieth-century progress. Nevertheless, the twins' world--a few square miles of countryside--is rich in the oddities, the wonders, and the tragedies of the human experience. In this extraordinary novel, Bruce Chatwin has captured every nuance of the Welsh landscape and of the lives and souls of the people who live there.

Review Quotes

"Totally alive . . . a spellbinding portrayal of the unbreakable link between nature and the human spirit."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A masterpiece, a chronicle of ordinary lives told with extraordinary insight." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Scene after scene is brought to life with an enraptured attention that causes them to glow with an almost visionary light." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Remarkable...like a beautiful old quilt, made up of bright vivid patches, with scenes that surprise and delight and seem absolutely true."-- People

"A rare book, one of those splendid evocations of place made so justifiably famous by masters of the British novel in the past century: George Eliot, Hardy, Lawrence."-- Houston Post

About the Author

Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) was the author of In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, and Utz. His other books are What Am I Doing Here and Anatomy of Restlessness, posthumous anthologies of shorter works, and Far Journeys, a collection of his photographs that also includes selections from his travel notebooks.