Rachel Phipps, owner of The Woodstock Bookshop, on a favourite novel detailing the life of a Welsh farming family

At the beginning of The Life of Rebecca Jones is a passage musing on tranquillity – “a reversal of creation. The perfection of an absence” – and this is exactly what Angharad Price achieved in her haunting, lyrical short novel.

Originally written in Welsh, it has been beautifully translated by Lloyd Jones.

It’s a fictional autobiography based on the life of Angharad’s great aunt Rebecca and recreates her life and that of her parents and family, who farmed at Cwym Maesglasau for many generations.

The place is just as important as the people – it holds and is also created by the people.

The book has beautiful, delicate descriptions of the house and the valley, and of the often very hard existence of the family.

There are also photographs of the place and its inhabitants woven in to the text – one particularly poignant family group is of Rebecca with her parents and three younger brothers, two of whom were blind from birth and sent to special schools aged only three and five, a sacrifice that meant Rebecca and her brother Bob had no education beyond the local primary school. Bob had to give up his dream of becoming a doctor and remained at the farm all his life, an unwilling farmer.

More children were born, some of whom died of diptheria, and the last one was also blind and sent away for his education.

For the blind brothers, their education was a liberation. One went to Oxford and became a vicar, another an excellent linguist, copier and editor of braille texts for the RNIB and a third, not blind from birth, became a blind painter.

The traditional way of farming is depicted just as it was changing and dying out.

This novel, described by Welsh historian and author Jan Morris as “the most fascinating and wonderful book”, won the Prose medal at the 2002 National Eisteddfod when it was first published and was named Book of the Year by the Welsh Arts Council in 2003.

The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price
Maclehoe Press, £7.99

Angharad Price is talking about The Life Of Rebecca Jones at The Woodstock Bookshop on Monday, January 19 at 7pm. For tickets, £5, call 01993 812760 or email info@woodstockbookshop.co.uk. The Woodstock Bookshop, Oxford Street, Woodstock OX20 1TH, woodstockbookshop.co.uk