One of the great joys of writing a blog is that you get to “know” people you never would have come across in your normal life.  Some of these people have become friends in the flesh.  Clare Dudman is not one of these.  I’ve never met her, although I have been following her blog, and therefore her travels, her work, her weird enquiries into snails and other scientific peculiarities for several years.  Although she has written several novels, this new one, “A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees” (published by Seren Books) is the first that I have read.  I read it because I felt that I knew her, wanted to support her as I do every writer I come to know, and was curious.  I was completely carried away and overwhelmed, and although I purposefully do not write book reviews here, it is a novel which I feel I must share.
Here’s what it is about, according to the jacket blurb:
      It is 1865 and, impoverished and oppressed in their own country, a desperate group of Welsh emigrants sets sail for a land flowing with milk and honey; a place, they have been promised, of meadows and tall trees, where they can build a new Wales. What they find after a  devastating sea journey is a cold South American desert already occupied by tribes of nomadic Indians, possibly intent on massacring them.
  This narrative about the Welsh colonists of Patagonia would be a ripping yarn, as they say, in the hands of any competent writer.  It has danger, dashed dreams, fears, jealousies, romance — everything you could want in a novel.  But in the hands of a writer of the calibre of Dudman, this has become much much more.  The fictional world she has created spans the centuries to grab the reader’s heart.  The characters she has created, some based on fact, some totally made up, become a part of the reader’s own world and portray examples of hope, perseverance, stubbornness, loss and love that stay with you long after you have picked up your next read.  Plus, it is written exquisitely.  Add to this the fact that Dudman has a Ph.D in Chemistry, and I found the experience of now getting to know her through her extraordinary novel completely humbling. How’s that for a recommendation?