Product Description

When Jenny and Robert fall in love in the late 1960s they decide to build a new future together, away from the city. They escape to an isolated sheep farm nestled on a mountainside. It has no running water but it is beautiful and rugged. Their young sons can roam wild.

As their flock struggles, money runs low and rain drives in horizontally across the fields, inside the ancient house their marriage begins to unravel. Wilful and romantic, Jenny refuses to abandon her farm. She will bring her boys up single-handedly on the mountain. Together they embark on a perilous adventure.

Running for the Hills is astonishing family memoir – Horatio Clare vividly recreates his mother’s extraordinary way of life and his own bewitching childhood in a magical story of love and struggle.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48647 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review

'Horatio Clare sucks thick honey from his past. A tender, eloquent book about love, the power of the land and the price to paid for living out one s dreams'

(Sarah Dunant )

'The joy in Running for the Hills lies in its seemingly effortless richness and precision.... It is a prose equivalent of a collection of poems by Ted Hughes - or Wordsworth. ... If this heartening, raw, tender, radiant first book has a lesson,... it is that women will manage better than men, and that their closer bond with nature may be our redemption.'

(John Carey, Sunday Times )

'Touching, funny and extremely well-written'

(Telegraph )

Enchanting ... magical ... so beautifully written that you almost hold your breath'  

(Daily Mail )

'Beautifully written memoir... As Clare's own memory kicks in, the book evolves into a lyrical recollection of a happy childhood, and a loving testimony to his mother, written with a sure-footed delicacy that announces the arrival of a major talent'

(Marie Clare )

It is the prose equivalent of a collection of poems by Ted Hughes or Wordsworth

(The Sunday Times )

'This charming book...outlines the process of scarification with an impressive honesty and delicacy' - Rebecca Loncraine

(Independent )

A salutary memoir about his life on a remote Welsh hill-farm

(Daily Mail )

A very charming and beautiful book which gets better and better with each turn of the page.

(Accent )

The classic Great Escape . . . strikingly told

(Matthew Bell, TLS )

An assured and compelling first book ... A moving exploration of the slow triumph of adversity over optimism

(Rose Tremain, The Sunday Telegraph ) --various

Review

'A tender, eloquent book about love, the power of the land and the price to paid for living out one’s dreams'

(Sarah Dunant )

'A joy ... heartening, raw, tender.'

(John Carey, Sunday Times )

'Touching, funny and extremely well-written'

(Telegraph )

Enchanting ... magical ... so beautifully written that you almost hold your breath'  

(Daily Mail )

'A major talent'

(Marie Clare )

‘Beautifully written … crammed with precious details … It should be required reading’

(Guardian )

‘It is the prose equivalent of a collection of poems by Ted Hughes – or Wordsworth’

(Sunday Times )

‘The classic Great Escape . . . strikingly told’

(Matthew Bell, TLS )

‘An assured and compelling first book … A moving exploration of the slow triumph of adversity over optimism’

(Rose Tremain, The Sunday Telegraph )

Peter Parker, Telegraph
'Touching, funny and extremely well-written'

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Customer Reviews

Running for the Hills
I heard 'snippets' of this while on the road in my job when it was featured in a recent Book of the Week on Radio 4 and I instantly struck by its charm - so I bought the book.
Well I've just finished it & I honestly think it's one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I've had in a very long time. It tells the story of Horatio's parents decision to leave London & set up home in a very remote Welsh hillside sheep farm.
It is really the story of a remarkable woman Jenny, (Horatio Clare's mother), who is completely and passionately obsessed with her desire to suceed in the toughest of environments, doing a job traditionally the domaine of men who have the benefit of years of family history & experience.
Jenny & her new husband, Robert arrive, virtual novices and throw themselves into the challenge of several lifetimes trying to keep themselves & their stock alive.
The challenges leave the couple no time for leisure or life as a 'couple' and the marriage inevitably fails. Robert returns to his life in London, leaving Jenny to continue farming alone, helped by her two young sons and an ageing neighbour.
It is partly the story of the unrelenting harshness of the hardest of farming environments, made utterly enchanting due to Jenny's absolute love of her animals and nature and her dedication to the task, which is also to give her boys a magical childhood.
The story is told by Horatio Clare who has a delicate touch - the story is his, but it is told in a objective way which makes you forget it is his life and mother he is describing. His ability to appreciate the beauty and convey it so wonderfully is a constant testament to his mother's passion and enthusiasm which never wanes, no matter how awful life becomes for them at times. You want to read & reread whole chapters, so beautiful is the writing.
If I were an English teacher, I would be using this book to encourage and inspire children to understand the beauty and power of words and nature.
Though Jenny eventually and reluctantly leaves the farm, she does so having achieved her mission; Horatio leaves you in no doubt that he and his brother have been blessed with the most passionate and inspiring of upbringings a child could ever have.

New talent alert
I first came across Horatio Clare's writing in magazines and mentally bookmarked the name, not that it's one you're likely to forget. He's published some trvael writing, on Morocco, I think, but this is is his first book, a sort of novelised memoir of his parents' divorce. It's set partly in London, his father's domain, but mostly on a Welsh hill farm. His parents acquired it as a retreat from London, but it soon becomes clear that his mother's investment in it is of diferent kind from his father's. A romantic of the full-flavour variety there's an irresistible pull to her attachement to the country and the hard life it obliges from those who settle there, even harder if you're a London literary type with two blonde haired little boys called Horatio and Alexander (funny scene in the primary school where they have to announce their names to an incredulous room of Hywels and Sioneds). And what of her husband, who has to earn a living, and for whom it seems the wild hill life is a colourful backdrop rather than home? As she and her boys are drawn into a beautiful and wild life there we too are drawn in, captivated by marvellous nature writing, by their risk-taking, by the remoteness of their locale and most movingly by the wrenching of their father from the picture. There's a heartbreaking scene when the young Horatio, on furlough in London, realises his father has finally gone. How do boys grow up without a father on the scene? What does a wild place do to the imaginations of children? What kind of enchantments belong to what kind of places?

I loved this book. It has all the virtues (and some of the vices - overwriting calsm down as the narrative proceeds) of a first novel from an exciting new writer.

Wild, and beautiful and wonderful.
I've just this minute finished reading this memoir and I had to write a review to say how much I enjoyed it. It is a memoir about Horatio Clare's mother and father and their hill farm in rural Wales. It charts his parents love and marriage and their separation taken from his parents diaries and letters and his own memory. At the fore is his mother, Jenny whose policy Live and Let Live allows such beauty to run wild over the dilapidated old house and the farm. She is a strong and passionate woman whose love for nature and animals (espcially her beloved sheep) makes the old farm a magical place for her two sons to grow up in and also inspires them. You can clearly see this in the authors writing, his love of the farm and his admiration for his mother. A very charming and beautiful book which gets better and better the more you read.