Description
A Rhondda Romance is a coming-of-age saga celebrating a circle of teenage friends who love each other to bits… and are desperate for ways to put themselves back together again. In the terraced streets and gwlis, the cafés and clubs of their once-mighty coal metropolis, they catch a glimpse of something humanity has always been searching for, something beyond themselves that they can live by.
Richly comic and keenly intelligent, heartfelt and ironic, fizzing with wit and allusion, John Geraint’s seriously playful approach to the past succeeds in questioning – and arguing with – all our assumptions about the place and the period it conjures up.
REVIEWS
“A veritable Tonypandemonium, full to the brim with bright life and vivid character, all told with oodles of humour and tongue-in-cheek self-awareness.
With a Chaucerian cast of characters such as Dai Toads, the dictatorial teacher, and dedicated layabouts MauMau and Parrot, this novel places Tonypandy Square as the centre of the universe and witnesses life whirl all around it.
It’s a pulsing story for the ages gathered from a small town which claims a big place in Welsh history just as it does in one boy’s clearly aching, breaking heart.” Jon Gower, writer and critic
“It may be that John Geraint has just invented a whole new genre of writing – Magical Rhondda-ism” Penelope Middelboe, author and campaigner
“Entrancing, moving and genuinely funny. John Geraint entertains and entrances as he shows how History was indeed what once lived us, and in between the cracks of memory still does.” Dai Smith, historian and novelist
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