This post was last updated on February 12th, 2025 at 02:58 pm
The best Welsh novels transport us to earlier times in Wales, exploring struggle and hardship after, during, and before the mining days. If Cymru is an area of interest, these stories by gifted Welsh novelists will allow you to glimpse Welsh life in a way rarely available to outsiders.
This list of the best Welsh novels lets us travel to earlier times in Wales when life changed. Some situations and events mentioned in the stories still fall within memory for some people. Others, however, happened before the younger generations were born.
That brings me to a word in the title of this post: hireath. What is hireath? The word “hireath” doesn’t translate directly into English. However, this definition gives you a pretty good idea of its meaning. Hireath is a deep and sometimes painful longing, much like homesickness. It’s often the yearning to return to a home or place you have a deep connection to or possibly to something that never existed. The word “hiraeth” is very strongly connected to Wales and the unbreakable ties the Welsh have to the Cymru of the past. Forvo gives us examples of proper pronunciation of the word by Welsh speakers.
The novels on this list are all brimming with this emotion. Whether you are Welsh or not, whether you live or have lived in Wales or not, you may still find yourself walking alongside the main characters in the Welsh countryside and feeling some of what they feel.
This post is about the best Welsh novels.
Best Welsh Novels
My People: Stories of the Peasantry of West Wales by Caradoc Evans
If you enjoy books on Welsh history, My People gives an account of the hardship of life in Wales through a series of tales about the working class in the early 20th century.
From the blurb: David Caradoc Evans was born on the 31st of December 1878 in Rhydlewis, Cardiganshire.
He left school at only 14 and worked in a series of menial jobs before moving to London to become a draper’s apprentice. After attending classes at St Pancras Working Men’s College, he became a journalist, worked at The Daily Mirror from 1917, and edited T P’s Weekly from 1923 until it closed 6 years later.
His first and most famous work was a series of short stories called ‘My People: Stories of the Peasantry of West Wales’ in 1915. His intention was to shock with his personally experienced stories of poverty, meanness, and hypocrisy. The Welsh critics were brutally savage, and for a time, he was called ‘the best-hated man in Wales’.
As well as collections of short stories, he wrote novels and plays, but nothing was to achieve either the success or the howls of rage that his short stories ever did.
My People has been called one of the best Welsh novels of all time.
How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
How Green Was My Valley was an international bestseller. It also won the National Book Award and became an exceptional film directed by John Ford.
Huw Morgan longs for the days before mining became a way of life. Back then, the valley where he lived was green and beautiful, and his town in South Wales was prosperous. He’s the youngest son from a family of miners, and now he’s on his own. Huw’s memories tell us how the mines both defined and ruined the state of things, including his family and the town as a whole.
Huw’s journey has moments of happiness but is also full of sorrow and hardship. The people and places he loved so much now live only in his memory. How Green Was My Valley is the first of four books in a series that describes Huw’s life. We learn how times became hard when the price of coal dropped. Although the miners formed unions, it didn’t solve the problem of keeping food on the table. It’s a well-written book and unexpectedly funny in parts, but it will tug on your heartstrings all the while.
Best Welsh Novels: The Dig by Cynan Jones
The Dig is one of the best Welsh novels for adults, especially if you enjoy the perspective of modern Welsh authors. This is one of those haunting books that grips and doesn’t let go. It’s no wonder that so many readers think of Jones as one of the most talented Welsh writers of the 21st century.
From the blurb: Life and death, animals and land, and a farmer and a stranger are all inextricably linked in this “dark, tense, and vital” award-winning novel (The Guardian). Daniel is a farmer in rural Wales who raises lambs. Another unnamed man hunts badgers and sells them to the locals. Slowly, the isolated lives of these two men spiral toward each other with a grim, inescapable logic. Written in a spare yet utterly gripping voice, Jones’s fourth novel received the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and “is brilliantly alive; a profound, powerful and utterly absorbing portrayal of a subterranean rural world” (The Guardian). As acclaimed by the Daily Telegraph, “It is a book about the essentials: life and death, cruelty and compassion. It is a book that will get in your bones and haunt you.”
The Great Welsh Auntie Novel by John Geraint
The Great Welsh Auntie is also perfect for readers who love Welsh history books in novel form. The book begins with the main character reflecting on a shocking event. Winston Churchill sent troops to stop Welsh coal miners who’d gone on strike.
From the blurb: Election Night, February 1974. On a Rhondda bus stop, surrounded by ghosts of the Tonypandy Riots, a painfully thin 17-year-old makes a vow that will change the course of history. Well, of his story, anyway…
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.
On the Black Hill: A Novel by Bruce Chatwin
From the blurb: The “spellbinding” (Los Angeles Times) second novel by the acclaimed author of The Songlines and In Patagonia
Lewis and Benjamin Jones, identical twins, were born with the century on a farm on the English-Welsh border. For eighty years they live on the farm—sharing the same clothes, tilling the same soil, sleeping in the same bed. Their lives and the lives of their neighbors—farmers, drovers, clergymen, traders, coffin-makers—are only obliquely touched by the chaos of twentieth-century progress. Nevertheless, the twins’ world—a few square miles of countryside—is rich in the oddities, the wonders, and the tragedies of the human experience. In this extraordinary novel, Bruce Chatwin has captured every nuance of the Welsh landscape and of the lives and souls of the people who live there.
Under Milk Wood: Including Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas is one of the most famous Welsh authors. I listed Under Milk Wood here as it’s thought of as his most famous book.
From the blurb: Under Milk Wood is Dylan Thomas’s best-known and best-loved work, his radio play completed in 1953 at the very end of his life. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog is his first collection solely of short stories, published in 1940. These two works show us his remarkable creative brilliance at the start and at the end of a highly productive writing life.
Thomas described Under Milk Wood variously as ‘a play, an impression for voices, an entertainment out of the darkness’. It had its most famous incarnation as a radio play, broadcast in 1954, only months after its author’s death. This is the text used for that broadcast. Full of the comedy of human existence, it also strikes notes of poignancy and loss as we travel through twenty-four hours in the company of those who inhabit the ‘multifariously busy little town’. It is an affectionate vision of the ‘drinks and loves and quarrels and dreams and wishes’ of people very much like ourselves. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog is a semi-autobiographical collection of stories set in and around the Swansea of Thomas’s youth. They are narratively engaging, full of pleasure in ordinary existence, and an even greater pleasure in the power of the imagination.
Best Welsh Novels: Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve (Library of Wales) by Dannie Abse
From the blurb: Widely acclaimed for its warm humor, lyricism, and honesty, this accurate evocation of the 1930s has become a classic. In this delightful autobiographical novel, Dannie Abse skilfully interweaves public and private themes, setting the fortunes of a Jewish family in Wales against the troubled backdrop of the times: unemployment, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and the Spanish Civil War.
This post was about the best Welsh novels.
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