Pamela Petro

From time to time, a book emerges from the vast uncharted literary world - its title and author unfamiliar, no chattering word-of-mouth or breathless reviews, no connection to anything else you've read or writers you favor. I can't help thinking it must be the work of the book itself - wending its way purposefully into its reader's hands, choosing you out of all the others who have never heard of it. To borrow from Thomas Swick, "It is a profound and sparkling exploration of ideas of home, loss, love, family, and sexuality. You come away from it not just in awe of her ability to seamlessly weave all of these themes into a rich and moving narrative, but with something much deeper: a new view of the world and your place in it."

As a note: "the long field" is an inadequate translation of the Welsh "hiraeth" - a longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time--an acute awareness of the presence of absence. This would be a book you "gift" to your friends more than recommend.… (meer)

I found this a delightful and thoughtful meander through the somewhat elusive Welsh concept of hiraeth. Pentos went to Wales to get a master's degree but ended up falling in love with the country and the feeling that this was her home, though she was not born there or had any relationship to it before she went. However, that is just the starting point for many side voyages into language and her own life and the history of Wales and learning Welsh (she still tries but has never quite managed it) and stone megaliths and miners strikes and much more. I can't recall why I added this book to my library list but I am very glad I did.… (meer)

A writer is studying Welsh in a small Welsh village and decides to travel around the world to the places where Welsh is (or was) spoken. An interesting enough travelogue, with your usual interesting bits of history intertwined with travelogue and talk about the Welsh.

From Patagonia to Singapore and other places unlikely to have Welsh influence, there is an attempt to come up with an overarching thesis on the Welsh language but doesn't quite get there. Instead, you finish the book with the tantalising question of whether the woman who accompanies Petro in her travels is her friend or her partner.… (meer)