The Best of Bruce Chatwin: On the Black Hill and The Songlines

Bruce Chatwin

may 2018 · Open Road Media

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A Whitbread Award–winning novel of Welsh twins and an international bestseller about Aboriginal culture by “the brilliant English writer and stylish nomad” (Los Angeles Times).
 
After his masterpiece of travel writing, In Patagonia, put him on the literary map, Bruce Chatwin penned a novel about twin brothers who never venture far from their Welsh farm. On the Black Hill won the Whitbread Literary Award for Best First Novel and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Following that work of fiction, Chatwin turned his focus to Australia and Aboriginal culture, creating a wholly original hybrid of memoir, travelogue, and novel in the international bestseller, The Songlines.
 
On the Black Hill: For forty-two years, identical twins Lewis and Benjamin Jones have shared a bed, a farm, and a life. But the world has made its mark on them each in different ways. At eighty, Lewis is still strong enough to wield an ax, and though he’s hardly ever ventured outside his little village on the Welsh/English border, he dreams of far-off lands. Benjamin is gentler, a cook whose favorite task is delivering baby lambs, and even in his old age, remains devoted to the memory of their mother. With his delicate attention to detail, Chatwin’s intense and poetic portrait of their shared lives in a little patch of Wales is “beautiful and haunting” (Los Angeles Times).
 
“A brooding pastoral tale full of tender grandeur.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
The Songlines: Long ago, the creators wandered Australia and sang the landscape into being, naming every rock, tree, and watering hole in the great desert. Those songs were passed down to the Aboriginals, and for centuries they have served not only as a shared heritage, but also as a living map. Entranced by this cultural heritage, a narrator named Bruce travels to Australia to probe the deepest meaning of these ancient, living songs, and embarks on a profound exploration of the nomadic instinct.
 
“Extraordinary. A remarkable and satisfying book.” —The Observer

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Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield in 1940. After attending Marlborough School, he began work as a porter at Sotheby’s. Eight years later, having become one of Sotheby’s youngest directors, he abandoned his job to pursue his passion for world travel. He worked for the Sunday Times from 1972 to 1975, before announcing his next departure in a telegram: “Gone to Patagonia for six months.” This trip inspired the first of Chatwin’s books, In Patagonia, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the E. M. Forster Award, and launched his writing career. Two of his books have been made into feature films: The Viceroy of Ouidah, retitled Cobra Verde and directed by Werner Herzog; and Andrew Grieve’s On the Black Hill. On publication, The Songlines went straight to number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list and remained in the top ten for nine months. On the Black Hill won the Whitbread Literary Award for First Novel. Utz, another work of fiction, was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Chatwin died in January 1989 at the age of forty-eight.