Unleaving

by Siân Collins

'This is a wonderful read. The time and place of this moving story are beautifully depicted.' ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH, author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency 'Collins writes with a vivid, descriptive style which transports the reader to different landscapes, building intrigue and mystery throughout the journey.’ SIWAN JONES ‘With clear, evocative prose Siân Collins’ debut novel speaks quietly of a deep love of place. Between the widely contrasting worlds of rural Carmarthenshire, with its woods and always-green fields, and the tough grasses and snakes beneath the lowering shadows of the Drakensberg mountains, South Africa, she spins a compelling and heart-warming story of mystery, loss and leaving.’ JESSICA SEATON, author of Gather Cook Feast; co-founder of Toast Forced to leave her family’s sprawling estate in the Towy Valley, seventeen-year-old Margaret Lewis travels with her bereaved parents to start a new life in South Africa. Stricken by mounting debt, her brother’s death in the Great War, and Major Lewis’ debilitating illness, the Lewises pin their hopes on Thorneybrook – a dilapidated farm in the Drakensberg foothills. Following in their footsteps is William Hughes – Margaret’s childhood friend. For Wil, South Africa offers him escape from an office job he hates, prospects, a chance to return to the land. But ghosts travel with Margaret and Wil, from the damp thickets of a Welsh wood to the shadows of a hot African night, in savage paintings and cryptic poems, in the secret codicil to a will. Together, Margaret and Wil are drawn into the web of secrets and deception which surround the mysterious property at Thorneybrook and the intertwined lives of those connected to it. Unleaving is a gripping coming-of-age novel set to the backdrop of 1920s apartheid South Africa.

248 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 11, 2020

About the author

Born in Pembrokeshire and raised in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, former home of the poet Dylan Thomas, I have lived much of my life outside Wales. After graduating in English Literature from Edinburgh University I taught at universities in South Africa, worked as an assistant editor on The Lancet, and ran English and Drama departments in several well-known London secondary schools. I returned to Wales ten years ago to teach and write in the beautiful Towy valley.. Unleaving is my first published novel.

Reviews

[Peter Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Siân Collins’s first novel is a mid-colonial mixing of feminism, miscegenation, misogyny, gender and racial inequalities against Welsh and South African backgrounds in the early 1920s, thus in essence utilizing a post-colonial lens. It also delineates some of the personal and social upheavals in the wake of the First World War and to a lesser extent the Boer War. The Author’s Welsh and South African experience are an asset - an implicit understanding of ‘being’ in varying environments particularly manifest in her landscape descriptions that have a beguiling and dramatic intensity. This a conventional novel (the occasional uses of Welsh dialogue are always translated) with characters clearly drawn, both plot and narrative are straight forward, exciting, albeit events are clearly signposted and hardly surprising; as for Percival Flynn, well you just want to get in there and give him a good kicking.