{"id":47600,"date":"2025-01-26T02:28:52","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T02:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/entertainment\/books\/book-review-this-house-by-sian-northey\/"},"modified":"2025-01-26T02:28:52","modified_gmt":"2025-01-26T02:28:52","slug":"book-review-this-house-by-sian-northey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=47600","title":{"rendered":"Book review: This House by Sian Northey"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><img data-lazyloaded=\"1\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-8376\" src=\"https:\/\/noseinabook.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/this-house-1-200x312.jpg\" alt=\"This House book cover\" width=\"200\" height=\"312\" srcset=\"https:\/\/noseinabook.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/this-house-1-200x312.jpg 200w, https:\/\/noseinabook.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/this-house-1-256x400.jpg 256w, https:\/\/noseinabook.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/this-house-1.jpg 400w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\"\/>Seeing as I chose it as one of my top five books of last year, you already know I loved <a href=\"https:\/\/www.3timesrebel.com\/pages\/this-house\"><i>This House<\/i><\/a> by Sian Northey, translated from Welsh by Susan Walton. It\u2019s a gentle, quiet novel about old age, grief, friendship and home.<\/p>\n<p>We meet Anna arriving home from hospital on crutches, hobbling around the remote house called Nant yr Aur, where she lives alone. But she doesn\u2019t have to cope entirely on her own. Soon we meet her friend Emyr, who drops in on her most days. He\u2019s a farmer and her only neighbour within walking distance. They\u2019re both getting old and though Emyr has a wife and two grown sons at home, he clearly values Anna\u2019s friendship.<\/p>\n<p>Between Emyr\u2019s visits, Anna reflects back on her life in the house, prompted by a letter she\u2019s received from someone offering to buy it. This isn\u2019t the first offer she\u2019s had, and she doesn\u2019t plan to accept, but it\u2019s made her reminisce. We learn she had a partner once, Ioan; in fact, the house was his, but she was the one who fell in love with it. When Anna decides to meet S\u00eeon, the young man who\u2019s made the offer, they strike up an unlikely friendship.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cNo was the answer, of course. Had she wished to sell, she would have done so years ago. She had received far better offers\u2026 But there was an understanding, a covenant of sorts. She\u2019d understood that the day she\u2019d first stepped over the threshold of Nant yr Aur. Or maybe she was imagining that now \u2013 that day was so long ago, as distant as yesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Though this isn\u2019t told in first person, it\u2019s a very close third person that feels almost as though Anna is telling her story. But key information is withheld until late in the story. Is this Anna ignoring or resisting certain truths, or is her memory beginning to fail? This creates a slow burn small mystery but that\u2019s not really the point of the book, in my opinion.<\/p>\n<p>Sian Northey has created a wonderfully compelling heroine. Anna is gruff, often outright grumpy. She insists on running this old cottage despite her age and health making it difficult to remain. She\u2019s stubborn and practical but also whimsical and funny.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cAnna sat down on one of the dining chairs and put the lid back on the tin of wax. She was suddenly tired, and the blood in her plastered leg felt like molten lead. She regretted using up her energy to do a job that could have waited\u2026A bit of dust never killed anyone. She started to make a mental list of things that could kill people, or kill them sooner than dust on furniture \u2013 a lack of food, heartbreak, earthquakes, an axe in the hands of a madman\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The tale about a woman who falls in love with a house sounds mad but this is anything but. It\u2019s a very real, humane story that made me laugh and cry. I really loved this and I\u2019m grateful to the <a href=\"https:\/\/goodbookclub.co.uk\/\">Good Book Club<\/a> for sending it to me as part of their subscription last year.<\/p>\n<p><i>Yn y Ty Hwn<\/i> published 2011 by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ylolfa.com\/en\">Y Lolfa Cyf<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This translation published 2024 by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.3timesrebel.com\/\">3Times Rebel Press<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Seeing as I chose it as one of my top five books of last year, you already know I loved This House by Sian Northey, translated from Welsh by Susan Walton. It\u2019s a gentle, quiet novel about old age, grief, friendship and home. We meet Anna arriving home from hospital on crutches, hobbling around the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47601,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[8203,2268,3820,594,28631,3749,28630,28629],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-47600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-ageing","tag-book","tag-fiction","tag-house","tag-northey","tag-review","tag-sian","tag-translation"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Book review: This House by Sian Northey - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=47600\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Book review: This House by Sian Northey - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Seeing as I chose it as one of my top five books of last year, you already know I loved This House by Sian Northey, translated from Welsh by Susan Walton. 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