Hometown Tales: Yorkshire

by Cathy Rentzenbrink, Victoria Hennison

Original tales by remarkable writers

Hometown Tales is a series of books pairing exciting new voices with some of the most talented and important writers at work today. Some of the tales are fiction and some are narrative non-fiction - they are all powerful, fascinating and moving, and aim to celebrate regional diversity and explore the meaning of home

In these pages on Yorkshire, you'll find two unique memoirs. 'The Yorkshire Years' is Cathy Rentzenbrink's deeply moving account of returning to Snaith, where her brother Matty was knocked down by a car over twenty years before. 'The Island upon the Moor' traces a powerful journey - from a carefree childhood in the village of Holme-upon-Spalding Moor - to surviving dark periods of depression, by Victoria Hennison.

160 pages, Hardcover

Published August 28, 2018

About the author

Cathy Rentzenbrink grew up in Yorkshire and now lives in London. A former Waterstones bookseller, she is now Project Director of the charity Quick Reads and Associate Editor of The Bookseller magazine.

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hometown Tales is an innovative series of books published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson pairing established authors with emerging writers, linked by a shared sense of place. Some of the titles in the series (e.g ‘Glasgow’ or ‘Birmingham’) have a more focused identity than this volume with the 4,500 odd square miles of Yorkshire to play with. The publishers have fortunately focused on two large villages in the East Riding (although one was historically in the West Riding, but this isn’t the place to get into the subtleties of the history of local government in the county…) and both are places I know well. Cathy Rentzenbrink, whose remarkable memoir The Last Act of Love tells the story of an adolescence in Snaith shaped by a family trauma, revisits the village and its neighbouring settlements with her Dutch husband, on a trip up from London, where they now live. In The Island on the Moor, Victoria Hennison remembers the joy of growing up in Holme-upon-Spalding-Moor, and the sudden descent into depression and self-harm that hit her in her teens. The two pieces are nicely counterpointed - Cathy Rentzenbrink arrived in Yorkshire from Cornwall as a very young child and moved away in adulthood, and looks at the county from the perspective of both an insider and a visitor (her childhood and adolescence spent in a busy village pub at the literal and metaphorical heart of the community gave her a privileged insight into the people and the place); Victoria Hennison has spent her entire life in Yorkshire, but is nevertheless now a partial outsider too, in that she now lives in the heart of the West Riding, and experiences similar sensations to those felt by Cathy on revisiting her childhood haunts further east.

[Nathalie Larsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good essays of belonging and home 🤷‍♀️

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book comprises two short memoirs by recounting growing up in different villages in East Yorkshire. The first I thoroughly enjoyed, but the second was more disappointing.