People of the Black Mountains

People of the Black Mountains is an historical novel by Raymond Williams.
This book is a work in two volumes, published in 1989 and 1990. It features a great diversity of people in a single place across the ages. Most of them are ordinary people living unprivileged lives. It is told thorough a series of flashbacks featuring an ordinary man in modern times. He is looking for his grandfather who has not returned from a hill-walk, but has visions of the past as it might have been.
It begins in the Old Stone Age and extends through to the Middle Ages, telling a series of fictionalized short stories about ordinary people in the Welsh-border region of the Black Mountains where he was born and grew up.
The series is solidly based on what archaeologists have found – some of the tales are speculative reconstructions based on real burials. It has been praised for "brilliant clarity and imaginative vision" ("Sunday Telegraph") and hailed as "the great historic novel Wales has long deserved" ("Wales on Sunday").
The story-sequence would have extended to modern times had Williams lived to finish it. What exists is a complete story arc extending from the Old Stone Age to the late-Mediaeval period. The story begins in the Old Stone Age and was intended to come right up to modern times, always focusing on ordinary people. He had completed it as mediaeval times when he died in 1988. It was prepared for publication by his wife Joy Williams and was published in two volumes, along with a Postscript that gives a brief description of what the remaining work would have been. 