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Caradog Prichard (1904-80) was born in the slate-quarrying town of Bethesda, in north-west Wales. He moved to London, and after the Second World War became a sub-editor on the foreign desk at the Daily Telegraph. During this time he wrote four prize-winning odes and this exceptional novel, which has posthumously been named The Greatest Welsh Novel of all time.
A remarkable book that recalls Under Milk Wood * Times Literary Supplement * One of the great lost voices ... For its portrayal of a vanished way of life, and for its evocation of the tearless sadness of insanity, this strange, melancholy book deserves to be widely read * Observer * Heart-wrenching. A classic to be read and reread * Daily Telegraph * An esoteric masterpiece. -- Jan Morris Lyrical and visceral, comic and tragic, compellingly earthy and maddeningly gothic - after 40 years this literary oddity continues to elude classification * Observer * One of the oddest, most elusive, most haunting novels ever. -- Niall Griffiths A very moving, often funny account of childhood. * Spectator * Utterly compelling * Guardian * Premonitions of insanity and the mercurial personality of its narrator give the story a hallucinatory, ambiguous edge. * Herald * Lyrical ... Prichard's elegiac account of a troubled boyhood belongs on the same shelf with Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes ... Readers will inevitably be reminded of another Welsh work, Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, that portrays various colourful inhabitants of a minuscule community ... Whether grim or playful, Prichard's vision in One Moonlit Night is communicated in language that provides intense esthetic pleasure. Those of us who do not know Welsh can only speculate about the texture and cadences of the original ... The sketches of various townspeople are especially sharp and often moving * New York Times * Caradog Prichard's wild, kaleidoscopic One Moonlit Night is widely considered to be the finest novel written in the Welsh language ... the obvious reference point is Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, but, for all its humour and energy, this is an altogether darker and more intense affair ... Bleak as it is, One Moonlit Night is never less than beautiful, and Philip Mitchell's 1995 translation retains its power and sensitivity -- Tom Bullough * Financial Times * An early precursor to The League of Gentlemen * Independent * Philip Mitchell's reworking of Prichard's Welsh conveys the particularity of a time and place that existed recently in years, but a world away in feeling * The Times *
