Send My Cold Bones Home

Old Johnny Ifor had never gone anywhere. Not physically, anyway. But in his mind; in the journals he's inherited; in the stories he starts to weave around Jonathon, he travels across oceans and generations. Jonathon had moved from city to city as a child, dragged in the wake of a father who always thought the next place must be better than all the "shit-holes" the family had just left behind. His best years had been lost sleeping rough on tropical beaches and cleaning toilets on the back-pack trail. As he sits in a darkening cottage watching what's left of his youth and sanity dribbling through the hourglass, Old Johnny’s stories bind him tighter to a north Wales island winter.
Send my Cold Bones Home When Jonathon, after a protacted spell of rough, back-packing life abroad, learns that he has inherited a country cottage on the island of Anglesey in north Wales, he finds himself transplanted to an unfamiliar world. There he meets a small but striking gallery of local characters: the rough and ready Nut and Bub who farm next door, their more intellectual, physically insubstantial, drinking companion Goronwy, and Tammy, the girl traumatised by a road accident, who becomes one of Jonathon's two obsessions. The other is Johnny, the neighbouring recluse who appears to have turned his back on the world beyond his cottage and the defunct quarry where he once worked. Uninterested in Jonathon's own travels around the world, Johnny gradually but methodically relates to him the narrative of family history which he has been carrying in his head: the Sinbad-like adventures of his seafaring forebears, his father's birth on a voyage to Valparaiso, later to drown in view of the same port, how his mother in her grief collected all the relics of her husband and turned her face away from her village that would only remind her of him. Johnny's stories unfold in tandem with the winter and with Jonathon's obsession with Tammy, gradually bringing Johnny and Jonathon ever closer until spring brings dissolution of different kinds to each. In his ambitious second novel, where place again becomes as much a protagonist as the inhabitants themselves, Tristan Hughes reveals the paradoxes of the islander's wide horizons within limited physical boundaries and of the traveller's confinement within his own psyche. With gentle understanding he explores the forces of inherited, imagined and lived experiences and the strange affinities that bring together damaged individuals. Cyfnewidfa Lên Cymru/Wales Literature Exchange -- Publisher: Parthian Books