A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Impoverished and oppressed, they'd been promised paradise on earth: a land flowing with milk and honey. But what the settlers found after a devastating sea journey was a cold South American desert where nothing could survive except tribes of nomadic Tehuelche Indians, possibly intent on massacring them. Silas James fears he has been tricked into sacrificing everything he loves for another man's impossible dream. But despite his hatred of the politically adept Edwyn Owen, and under the watchful eye of Indian shaman Yelue, a new culture takes root as an old one passes away. A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees is a lyrical and insightful evocation of the trials of the first Welsh Patagonian colonists as they battle to survive hunger, loss, and each other.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Before reading Clare Dudman's new novel, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees, I was only vaguely aware of a Welsh presence in Patagonia. I knew, in a Trivial Pursuits kind of way, that there was a pocket of Welsh speaking down there in South America, and I had the bizarre fictional images from Malcolm Pryce's wonderful noir detective stories set in a fantasy Aberystwyth (like Abertystwyth, Mon Amour), where Patagonia is frequently referred to as the Welsh equivalent of Vietnam, with war veterans cropping up in the stories now and again. But I knew nothing of the real nineteenth century attempt to colonize part of Patagonia.
Although the book is a novel it really does capture the historical context beautifully - you can feel the hardship of reaching the place, only to discover that the promised meadows and tall trees are actually scrubland and bare earth. The colonists battle against remarkable odds, losing loved ones and nearly starving. The author is always wonderful at giving us a feel of what it's like to live in a different environment, and I've never seen it done better. Lyrical and informative in equal parts, this is a novel that a non-fiction reader can appreciate for its descriptive content while still giving flight to the imagination and good development of characters that the reader cares about. Recommended.
Although the book is a novel it really does capture the historical context beautifully - you can feel the hardship of reaching the place, only to discover that the promised meadows and tall trees are actually scrubland and bare earth. The colonists battle against remarkable odds, losing loved ones and nearly starving. The author is always wonderful at giving us a feel of what it's like to live in a different environment, and I've never seen it done better. Lyrical and informative in equal parts, this is a novel that a non-fiction reader can appreciate for its descriptive content while still giving flight to the imagination and good development of characters that the reader cares about. Recommended.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a very powerful book. It starts with a punch and doesn't let up as it describes the adventures - and misadventures - of a group of nineteenth century Welsh settlers in the wilder parts of Patagonia. They battle with the elements, the indigenous peoples, bureaucracy and, most importantly, one another as they try to establish themselves in hostile territory. It's a beautifully written tale in which the historical elements - obviously the result of considerable research - never override the human story. I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Tall Trees and Welsh Snakes
16 Jan 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
DISCLAIMER: The author is a friend of mine, so you may worry that my praise of her book is due to bias, whether conscious or unconscious. The latter may be the case, of course, but I'd invite you to read her book yourself to see if my high opinion is justified. I can only repeat the conversation I had with my eight-year-old daughter the other day:
"This is Clare's book. She's a really, really good writer."
"Then why does she talk to *you*?"
I think it's because I'm lucky.
-----
It was clear to Silas, at least, from the start: the New Wales they'd been promised in Patagonia was a fiction. The other colonists were more apt to be persuaded by their charismatic leader's claims, whatever the evidence of their own eyes. Edwyn Lloyd promised them lush meadows and tall trees, a future for their families and for Welsh culture in South America. What they got was a desert.
Clare Dudman's 2010 novel A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees tells the story of the Welsh colonization of Patagonia in the 19th century. Her work is fiction, but it's based on real-life events, and several of her characters are fleshed out from what little is known of the early settlers. Dudman's focus is on Silas James and his wife Megan, who endure more as a result of their emigration than most of the colonists. Their story is in fact almost unendurably sad, so that one wants to tell the author to stop heaping sorrows on these poor people, but it's not her fault: their tragedies were in fact suffered by their real-life counterparts, Aaron and Rachel Jenkins, who sailed to Patagonia with the first group of settlers in 1865.
The villain of Dudman's story is Edwyn Lloyd, who holds sway over the colonists longer than he should because of his fiery oratory. He's a man with a vision and, it seems, limited conscience, a snake whose arrival on the scene usually signals further trouble. But one of the best moments for me in the book is about 40 pages from the end, when Edwyn for once stands out as a voice of reason and we see at once how complex his character and his relationship with Silas are.
An important part of the colonists' experience in Patagonia relates to the local Indian tribes, nomads who follow the migration of the llama-like guanaco. Part of Dudman's story is told from the point of view of an Indian shaman, Yeluc, who is the first native to make contact with the settlers. Through Yeluc we see that the experience of the soon-to-be-displaced Indians parallels to an extent that of the Welsh, who have left their homes in part to preserve their culture in the face of suppression by the English.
A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees is beautifully written and powerful. Also surprising: going into it I already knew more or less what it would be about, yet I was still caught off-guard repeatedly at how the author chose to tell the story. That it's a beautiful read, however, did not come as a surprise. I expected nothing less from the author of One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead.
"This is Clare's book. She's a really, really good writer."
"Then why does she talk to *you*?"
I think it's because I'm lucky.
-----
It was clear to Silas, at least, from the start: the New Wales they'd been promised in Patagonia was a fiction. The other colonists were more apt to be persuaded by their charismatic leader's claims, whatever the evidence of their own eyes. Edwyn Lloyd promised them lush meadows and tall trees, a future for their families and for Welsh culture in South America. What they got was a desert.
Clare Dudman's 2010 novel A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees tells the story of the Welsh colonization of Patagonia in the 19th century. Her work is fiction, but it's based on real-life events, and several of her characters are fleshed out from what little is known of the early settlers. Dudman's focus is on Silas James and his wife Megan, who endure more as a result of their emigration than most of the colonists. Their story is in fact almost unendurably sad, so that one wants to tell the author to stop heaping sorrows on these poor people, but it's not her fault: their tragedies were in fact suffered by their real-life counterparts, Aaron and Rachel Jenkins, who sailed to Patagonia with the first group of settlers in 1865.
The villain of Dudman's story is Edwyn Lloyd, who holds sway over the colonists longer than he should because of his fiery oratory. He's a man with a vision and, it seems, limited conscience, a snake whose arrival on the scene usually signals further trouble. But one of the best moments for me in the book is about 40 pages from the end, when Edwyn for once stands out as a voice of reason and we see at once how complex his character and his relationship with Silas are.
An important part of the colonists' experience in Patagonia relates to the local Indian tribes, nomads who follow the migration of the llama-like guanaco. Part of Dudman's story is told from the point of view of an Indian shaman, Yeluc, who is the first native to make contact with the settlers. Through Yeluc we see that the experience of the soon-to-be-displaced Indians parallels to an extent that of the Welsh, who have left their homes in part to preserve their culture in the face of suppression by the English.
A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees is beautifully written and powerful. Also surprising: going into it I already knew more or less what it would be about, yet I was still caught off-guard repeatedly at how the author chose to tell the story. That it's a beautiful read, however, did not come as a surprise. I expected nothing less from the author of One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead.
Was this review helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
