Books by Mike Parker
On the Red Hill
Wales Book of the Year Non-fiction Winner & Highly Commended (runner-up) for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2020:
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"An extraordinary memoir that stood out amongst our strongest shortlist to date" - Wainwright Prize adjudication
In early 2006, Mike and his partner Peredur were witnesses at the very first civil partnership ceremony in their local town, Machynlleth in mid-Wales. The celebrants were their friends Reg and George, who had met in war-torn London and moved to deepest rural Montgomeryshire in 1972, only a handful of years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality.
When Reg and George died within a few weeks of each other in 2011, Mike and Peredur discovered that they had been left their home: a whitewashed 'house from the children's stories', buried deep within the hills. They had also been left a lifetime's collection of diaries, photographs, letters and books that told an extraordinary history.
On the Red Hill is that story: of Rhiw Goch, 'the Red Hill', and its inhabitants, but also of a remarkable rural community and a legacy that extends far beyond bricks and mortar. Taking the four seasons, the four elements, the four directions and these four lives as his structure, Mike creates a lyrical but clear-eyed exploration of the natural world, the challenges of accepting one's place in it, and what it can mean to find home.
Buy the book:
On the Red Hill by Mike Parker, William Heinemann, June 2019, hardback, £16.99
"This lovely memoir... On the Red Hill is many things: an examination of the intertwined lives of the four men and their rural town; a portrait of an unforgettable landscape; a social history of the queer community in Wales over many decades. It's divided into four sections, each featuring one of the men, all steeped in the natural beauty and rhythms of the countryside. Though the story is a complex one, Parker never loses track of its many threads. Just when you begin to wonder how he will bring the story back around to Rhiw Goch, he does it, time and again casting the textures and smells and colors of the farm into sharp relief." - New York Times
"An extraordinary, ambitious, many-layered memoir... a book that is deep in riches." - Simon Callow, Guardian
"Intense, fascinating... important." - Daily Telegraph
"A multi-layered, laceratingly honest and deeply revealing book about landscape, love of place and most of all about love with all its complexities." - Jon Gower, nation.cymru
"This is such a delightful book about beauty, joy, love and home. Risky themes nowadays, but held to account by the richly rigorous – and clever – structure." - Sara Maitland
"Always gripping, often romantic but never sentimental... This is the truest version of modern Welsh life I have ever read." - Manon Steffan Ros
"A marvellous book... an uplifting tale of tranquillity sought and found in the nearest Britain gets to paradise." - Sir Simon Jenkins
"There are worlds on worlds within this lyrical and profoundly cultured book. In an age of toxic artifice, this is the most necessary medicine: the tenderness of reality and the living, elemental, world." - Jay Griffiths