This is not a cheery book. In fact, if you think the Welsh are mostly miserable, complaining, and struggling with bleak lives in a kind of traditional trope with sheep and rain, this book will confirm your suspicions.

The farming family consists of John who is a compulsive gambler, a struggling sheep farmer and a depressive; his wife Catrin beaten down by life in a sort of palms clenched kind of way and without doing anything about it (well almost); Rhys a fairly disturbed teenager, and an older brother Harri who has joined the army and is currently in Iraq in the middle of conflict following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. They all have secrets which doesn’t help, and worry about Harri in their own ways.

It doesn’t seem to be the case that anxiety about Harri is a driver for their general misery and, more than likely, that is part of what has driven him to join the army! The other part is that he is gay and that’s a secret as well. Anyway, they roll around in squalor and debt (even the dog is on its last legs), Catrin has a miserable affair and, well, you can guess what happens to Harri.

Quite improbably, at the end of the novel everything is sorted out and it is a sort of happy ending.

There’s something about this portrayal of Wales which seems stuck in the 1950s although the book is set in around 2004 onwards. There’s no handy household technology, the farming is primitive and life revolves around the betting shop and the pub. It’s almost a pastiche!

Of course, some people will find it heart-wrenchingly authentic, and it does focus on a shameful period of history, and it does tag on extracts from the Chilcott report to give the story more gravitas but it didn’t quite work for me.