On the Black Hill

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. Nonetheless, the twins’ world—a few square miles of Welsh 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 lived there.