Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir

The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir

Petro, Pamela

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralGreat Britain

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1956763678
ISBN13: 9781956763676
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: Aug 15 2023
Pages: 356
Weight: 1.83
Height: 1.16 Width: 6.39 Depth: 9.28
Language: English
For readers of H Is for Hawk, an intimate memoir of belonging and loss and a mesmerizing travelogue through the landscapes and language of Wales
Hiraeth is a Welsh word that's famously hard to translate. Literally, it can mean long field but generally translates into English, inadequately, as homesickness. At heart, hiraeth suggests something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time--an acute awareness of the presence of absence.

In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life--as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible Amtrak train crash, and as the daughter of a parent with dementia. Through the pull and tangle of these stories and her travels throughout Wales, hiraeth takes on radical new meanings. There is traditional hiraeth of place and home, but also queer hiraeth; and hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics. On this journey, the notion begins to morph from a uniquely Welsh experience to a universal human condition, from deep longing to the creative responses to loss that Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture. It becomes a tool to understand ourselves in our time.

A finalist for the Wales Book of the Year Award and named to the Telegraph's and Financial Times's Top 10 lists for travel writing, The Long Field is an unforgettable exploration of the hidden contours of the human heart.

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