Description
The Journeying Boy is a beautifully crafted travelogue, a charming history of Wales, and a nostalgic look back at one man’s varied and interesting life. Jon Manchip White returns to his native Wales for the first time in twenty years and discovers that time has wrought immense change to this unusual and mysterious little country in the United Kingdom. While touring the country, White recounts his childhood in Cardiff, where his fore bears had lived since Norman times, spawning an entertaining crew of rich men and ne’er-do-wells, shipowners, sea captains, buccaneers, and murders. From Cardiff, White travels to the coal country of Glamorgan and the Black Mountains, introducing an amazing panoply of odd Welsh characters, past and present: from kings and queens, poets and writers, to warriors, coal miners, and seamen. At the heart of the story is the singular and tragic nature of the Welsh race—their language, their religion, their passion for music and literature, their love of life, and their obsession with death.
Praise for The Journeying Boy
The Journeying Boy is a touching and evocative book, part autobiography, part family chronicle, part Welsh history, part travelogue. This is as it should be, for White is clearly a man of parts: novelist, historian, biographer, teacher, traveler. He does all of it very well indeed… He brings Wales palpably alive, and arouses in the distant reader a hot yearning to visit it.
—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
Jon Manchip White is a marvel, and an example to us all. He has written masterfully in every form, and I have greatly profited from reading him for many years. Even at the towering age of 88 his brilliance is undiminished. He is that rarest of writers—an enchanter.
—Paul Theroux
