The Long Field

The paperback edition of the highly acclaimed memoir in which the American travel writer, Pamela Petro, writes a love letter to Wales and explores the meaning of ‘hiraeth’, a famously hard to translate word which approximates to a deep longing for an irretrievable place, person or time. The Long Field takes the original hiraeth stories of Wales and weaves them into Petro’s own life: as an American who loves Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a train crash, as the daughter of a parent with dementia. In The Long Field Petro concludes that hiraeth as a response to loss is the wellspring of creativity.