Unleaving

by Siân Collins

Forced to leave her family home in the Towy Valley, 17 year old Margaret Lewis travels with her parents to take up a new life in South Africa. After her father's death, Margaret and her friend run the dilapidated farm, but soon fall into the web of secrets and deception surrounding the property. A gripping coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of 1920s South Africa.

297 pages, Paperback

Published October 25, 2019

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.