Library of Wales: Home to an Empty House

The seventh in the popular Library of Wales series of republished classic Welsh writing in English, Alun Richards's Home to an Empty House was first published in the early 1970s. Like Dannie Abse’s Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve, also recently republished in the same series, Richards’s novel draws heavily on the author’s life in English-speaking Wales, an unromanticised industrialised landscape where plain speaking and harsh realities take precedence over the poetic and the mythic, perhaps the more traditional province of Welsh prose. Forthright and prosaic his writing might be, but Richards’s characters have a real warmth and depth. Struggling in a marriage that gives neither what they need, Walter, paranoid and lost in illness, and Connie, forever looking towards the horizon for something more, are the desolate core of a story that is mirrored in the crumbling valleys’ industries. There is wit and warmth amongst the searching and disintegration and an ultimate feeling of hope for both Richards’s characters and his Wales. Richards was a prolific writer, Home to an Empty House being among one of six novels, numerous radio and stage plays, television adaptations, screenplays and biography. His autobiography, Days of Absence, was published in 1986 and deals candidly with his own struggles with illness, clearly the inspiration for Walter’s battle with tuberculosis at the opening of Home to an Empty House. He died in 2004. -- Michael Nobbs @ www.gwales.com