Running for the Hills - Couverture rigide

'The young family has to face the hardships that small farmers and smallholders endure everywhere' (The Times)

'Horatio Clare sucks thick honey from his past. A tender, eloquent book about love, the power of the land and the price to paid for living out one's dreams' (Sarah Dunant)

'The joy in Running for the Hills lies in its seemingly effortless richness and precision.... It is a prose equivalent of a collection of poems by Ted Hughes - or Wordsworth. ... If this heartening, raw, tender, radiant first book has a lesson,... it is that women will manage better than men, and that their closer bond with nature may be our redemption.' (John Carey, Sunday Times)

'Touching, funny and extremely well-written' (Telegraph)

Enchanting ... magical ... so beautifully written that you almost hold your breath' (Daily Mail)

'Beautifully written memoir... As Clare's own memory kicks in, the book evolves into a lyrical recollection of a happy childhood, and a loving testimony to his mother, written with a sure-footed delicacy that announces the arrival of a major talent' (Marie Clare)

'It is the prose equivalent of a collection of poems by Ted Hughes - or Wordsworth' (The Sunday Times)

'This charming book...outlines the process of scarification with an impressive honesty and delicacy' - Rebecca Loncraine (Independent)

'A salutary memoir about his life on a remote Welsh hill-farm' (Daily Mail)

'A very charming and beautiful book which gets better and better with each turn of the page.' (Accent)

One summer's day in the late 1960s two young Londoners fell in love with a hill farm in South Wales.

But they had almost no money, no idea about sheep, and their marriage was uncertain from the start.

Their new home was a mile up the wild mountain, one end dug into its damp flank. It was ancient, cold and unbelievably primitive, with a view like a prospect of Africa. On a fair day it was paradise.

But it was a working farm, cut off from the world and condemned - they found out, after they bought it - as 'unfit for human habitation'.

This is the story of a passionate adventure; it is also the biography of a relationship, a portrait of an extraordinary way of life and an account of a bewitching childhood. From memory, conversations and the diaries of his now-separated parents, Horatio Clare reconstructs their relationship with each other and their mountain farm, and tells the story of his astonishing upbringing. At the fore is his mother, a wilful romantic, who chooses to make a life on the mountain single-handedly, and to raise her children there.

Running for the Hills is a vivid memoir of love and struggle in a remote and magical place.