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Send My Cold Bones Home
Exploring the nature of obsession and entrapment, this novel is fortified by a strong dose of the macabre. It also displays a fascination with haunting, and—with more than a sinister nod to the ghost story—it probes the absences of fathers and mothers and the art of getting away.
331 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2006
10 people want to read
About the author
Tristan Hughes
11 books17 followersTristan Hughes was born in Atikokan, Ontario, and brought up on the Welsh island of Ynys Môn. He has a PhD in literature from King’s College, Cambridge, and has taught American literature in Cambridge, Taiwan, Wales and Germany. He won the Rhys Davies Short Story Award in 2002, and his first two novels, The Tower and Send My Cold Bones Home, were highly praised in the U.K. Revenant is his third novel.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 6, 2012
This would've been for class, except that course never ran. I was curious about it anyway, though, since Tristan Hughes taught one of my housemates creative writing, and yet none of us had read anything by him. (I think I have, actually, now I think about it, but Send My Cold Bones Home is the book I've been thinking about getting round to reading.)
It's a strange sort of book: all atmosphere and character, with no real plot, just a disconnected jumble of stories and daydreams and nightmares and memories -- and it's not always clear which one is which. Normally, I think I'd have been bored by it, but there is something about the writing, the atmosphere, that kept me hooked, even though now I couldn't really tell you much about the book. Tristan Hughes is a powerful writer, definitely.
It's a strange sort of book: all atmosphere and character, with no real plot, just a disconnected jumble of stories and daydreams and nightmares and memories -- and it's not always clear which one is which. Normally, I think I'd have been bored by it, but there is something about the writing, the atmosphere, that kept me hooked, even though now I couldn't really tell you much about the book. Tristan Hughes is a powerful writer, definitely.
August 31, 2023
“The past doesn't just inform the present, it deforms it, and that's an insight I'm slightly obsessed by.” Tristan Hughes, 2006
Here’s a novel full of interesting themes – imaginary versus real worlds, the paralysis of past trauma, stasis versus movement – that don’t quite translate into a compelling whole.
Set in Ynys Môn, it essentially pits an elderly reclusive islander who lives in the globe-spanning tales of his family’s past against a younger, rootless incomer who feels compelled to listen to his rime.
Some of it works well. The core and essence of the old islander’s world is the aptly named Llanysgerbwd – the family village – just a few miles away, but never visited till in his coffin. It is desolate. “He had sat still for eighty years and invested a place fifteen miles from his front door with all the lustre an exile saves for the land he has left or lost or never known, burnishing it until it glinted and dazzled beneath the beams of some mythopoeic sun.”
The book opens with this funeral journey to Llanysgerbwd which is promisingly atmospheric, but the atmosphere quickly dissipates in details of the unengaging narrator’s comings and goings, encounters with thinly sketched secondary characters, and the old man’s tales of forebears voyaging to Valparaiso or pursuing the descendants of Madoc. It all gets a bit messy and disjointed, not saved by the prose which tends toward the functional – and not even that when it comes to dialogue.
There’s a good Welsh gothic novel hidden in here somewhere, but as it stands the book left my old bones cold.
Here’s a novel full of interesting themes – imaginary versus real worlds, the paralysis of past trauma, stasis versus movement – that don’t quite translate into a compelling whole.
Set in Ynys Môn, it essentially pits an elderly reclusive islander who lives in the globe-spanning tales of his family’s past against a younger, rootless incomer who feels compelled to listen to his rime.
Some of it works well. The core and essence of the old islander’s world is the aptly named Llanysgerbwd – the family village – just a few miles away, but never visited till in his coffin. It is desolate. “He had sat still for eighty years and invested a place fifteen miles from his front door with all the lustre an exile saves for the land he has left or lost or never known, burnishing it until it glinted and dazzled beneath the beams of some mythopoeic sun.”
The book opens with this funeral journey to Llanysgerbwd which is promisingly atmospheric, but the atmosphere quickly dissipates in details of the unengaging narrator’s comings and goings, encounters with thinly sketched secondary characters, and the old man’s tales of forebears voyaging to Valparaiso or pursuing the descendants of Madoc. It all gets a bit messy and disjointed, not saved by the prose which tends toward the functional – and not even that when it comes to dialogue.
There’s a good Welsh gothic novel hidden in here somewhere, but as it stands the book left my old bones cold.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews