This is the story of one place, one family (and yet, in many ways, hauntingly true of families throughout the south Wales coalfield) whose narrative takes us as far as the West Indies in the time of slavery, the high seas off Singapore, and the pogroms of Tsarist Ukraine.
At the heart of Sam Adams's brilliant and remarkable book is a sense of belonging, a sense of place. The red-tinted bed of a slim stream rising in the moorland overlooking a small, isolated unpopulated valley, a "cil fach", gave its name to his birthplace. And this is also the story of the entry of Gilfach Goch into history as a mining valley, separate from the anthill of the forked valleys of Rhondda, with its own curious tripartite administration and its own special part to play in the turbulence of the south Wales coalfield