House Under the Hill

Knox melds historical sources with fictional characters to create a pleasant work narrated by a house in Wales. The novel lacks a conventional plot; it intersperses moments from the lives of the real Kearley family from the first decades of the 20th century with an extended story of a game of hide and seek gone wrong in 1954. The house is Gwylfa Hiraethog, meaning roughly “watchtower of longing,” and was christened by none other than Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and is “the highest inhabited house in Wales.” A speech by Lloyd George features, as does a vignette of the Kearleys on the home front during the Great War. Gwylfa occasionally imparts commentary on the residents of the moment or its increasingly dilapidated state. Knox concludes with Gwylfa’s final thoughts from 2018 and a photo of the shell of the house as it is today. Knox’s prose is buoyant and keeps the book from bogging down into a dense historical text. Though light, this diverting novel is notable for its detailed and lively depiction of its setting. [em](BookLife) [/em]