How Green Was My Valley

Nov 16, 2025 5:09 PM

Author:Richard Llewellyn

A poignant coming-of-age novel set in a Welsh mining town, Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley is a paean to a more innocent age, published in Penguin Modern Classics

Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons - at the kitchen table, at Chapel and around the pit-head. Looking back on the hardships of his early life, where difficult days are faced with courage but the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory. An immediate bestseller on publication in 1939, How Green Was My Valley quickly became one of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century. Poetic and nostalgic, it is an elegy to a lost world.

Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd (1906-1983), better known by his pen name Richard Llewellyn, claimed to have been born in St David's, Pembrokeshire, Wales; after his death he was discovered to have been born of Welsh parents in Hendon, Middlesex. His famous first novel How Green Was My Valley (1939) was begun in St David's from a draft he had written in India, and was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film by director John Ford. None But the Lonely Heart, his second novel, was published in 1943, and subsequently made into a film starring Cary Grant and Ethel Barrymore. As well as novels including Green, Green My Valley Now (1975) and I Stand on a Quiet Shore (1982), Llewellyn wrote two highly successful plays, Poison Pen and Noose

If you enjoyed How Green Was My Valley, you might like Barry Hines' A Kestrel for a Knave, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Vivid, eloquent, poetical, glowing with an inner flame of emotion'

The Times Literary Supplement

Reviews

'The funniest book I have ever read'

—— Julian Symons , The Times

His first, most perfect novel ... a ruthlessly comic plot

—— John Mortimer , Guardian

'You must read Rupert Morgan's outstanding Let There Be Lite...It's fast-moving and hilarious...Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams will be spitting feathers'

—— Esquire

'Bittersweet, laugh-out-loud funny, and all too true'

—— Fay Weldon

'Outstanding...Fans of Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams will adore this dazzling satire on the digital age, but it is startlingly original from its side-splitting first lines to the thoughtful conclusion...Packed with fresh comic touches'

—— Amazon.co.uk

'Rupert Morgan's irrepressible wit sees humour wherever he looks. The plot unfolds like a firework display, one explosion after another, each one more outrageous than the one before...The pace of the performance builds up into a grand finale that leaves you gasping and wide-eyed. This is a first novel by someone who has perfected his craft. The interweavings of plot and character are skilfully executed. But above all it is so good to be made to laugh - really laugh. This is one of those books, like Louis de Berniere's, which will have your friends and family furiously demanding to see what you are reading that makes you so roar with laughter'

—— Oxford Times

'Amusing and inventive'

—— Peter Ackroyd

'A really brilliant first novel, he is obviously a major talent'

—— Prunella Scales

'The match of the madder moments of John Irving or Tom Sharpe...this is a promisingly entertaining "lite" read'

—— The Times

'At its best when taking pot-shots at a wide variety of modern ills - fast food, tabloid media, downsizing, soap-opera politics...One of Morgan's nicer inventions is a computer program that boils down complex texts to their essentials. Its treatment of the Old Testament renders it down to: "Because I say so, that's why"'

—— Independent

'Suspenseful, atmospheric and highly intelligent, Jody Shields focuses a brilliant light on the murky world of imperial Vienna'

—— D. M. Thomas

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