I Can Hear the Cuckoo: Life in the Wilds of Wales

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Yes, I really don’t like sad animal stuff and this was on the edges of what I can tolerate but it wasn’t detailed so I was just about OK. Kiran lived in London and she recounts the horrific experience of losing her Mum to whom she was very close. Her descriptions of the change in herself, enjoying nature and things that she never would have previously before her mother passed away, of the process of "living" again, rang powerful and true. This book offers a gentle reminder of the true meaning of life and our place in the natural world around us. After her mother’s loss, she cannot handle the psychological and mental agony, so she makes the drastic choice of leaving the luxurious city life and settling in the Welsh valley in The Long Barn cottage, her new home, surrounded by mountains, lakes, and a plethora of flora and fauna with extreme Welsh (winter) weather when it arrives.

I Can Hear the Cuckoo is a tender, philosophical memoir about the beauty of a microscopic life, the value of solitariness, and respecting the rhythm and timing of the earth. So much felt familiar yet also felt strange, a testament to how vast this beautiful countryside is and how well written this book is. The book starts with some pictures,which entice you in and help you relate to the book as you go along. I often forget to read the NetGalley books I have downloaded if I have a lot of library books out but I did fill out a recent survey and it asked a lot of questions about its Shelf app.She notes it’s odd to be a Brown woman in a rural Welsh setting, but also notes that everyone’s different there and you are compelled into companionship with people with whom you have little in common; also, everything has been there for centuries and is infinite so that pales into insignificance. I requested this book from NetGalley after seeing it on Paul Halfman Halfbook’s blog post about upcoming books – one of his other commenters mentioned they were going to look them up on NG and I followed suit and ended up with a couple.

Kiran Sidhu's book is a bit different as it's not solely about grief and death, although that's the underlying backstory.I wondered what I missed in life by thinking that the wisdom of others whose lives were different to mine could not have any bearing on my life. Sidhu doesn’t mention her Indian heritage much, apart from musing on how Indian women are often put upon wherever they are, and that she was uncomfortable with the assumption she did or should have children when she went to visit relatives there. Having moved first to rural west Wales and then to a small town in Powys, it’d be interesting to compare the experiences of relocating – though of course there’s evidently more to this book than just moving house. Her article about her farmer friend Wilf was the 13th most read article in The Guardian in 2021, and was made into a short film Heart Valley , directed by Christian Cargill and produced by Pulse Films. It felt as if this was used as padding and could have been easily replaced by a deeper drilling down into her experiences of not only being an outsider but a woman of Indian descent in an otherwise white monoculture.

About the Author: Kiran Sidhu is a freelance journalist and has written features, lifestyle and opinion pieces for The Guardian, Observer, Telegraph, The i Paper, The Independent, Metro, Woman magazine, Woman's Own and Breathe magazine.All this aside, Sidhu finds solace in a slower pace of life, adapting to rhythms of life defined by sheep farming, the weather, the light and being accepted by another sort of family, a community who accept and embrace her.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Kiran Sidhu never thought she could leave London, but when her mother passes away, she knows she has to walk out of her old life and leave her toxic family behind. But she quickly discovers a sense of belonging in the small, close-knit community she finds there; her neighbour Sarah, who teaches her how to sledge when the winter snow arrives; Jane, a 70-year-old woman who lives at the top of a mountain with three dogs and four alpacas with an inspiring attitude for life; and Wilf, the farmer who eats the same supper every day, and taught Kiran that the cuckoo arrives in April and leaves in July. She chooses fresh air, an auditorium of silence and the purity of the natural world – and soon arrives in Cellan, a small, remote village nestled in the Welsh valleys.

Reading this book I felt wrapped and held in the unfolding story,while been given the space to explore,what is being offered in relation to my own journey,side by side. But as the months wear on, Kiran starts to connect with the close-knit community she finds there; her neighbour Sarah, who shows her how to sledge when the winter snow arrives; Jane, a 70-year-old woman who lives at the top of a mountain with three dogs and four alpacas; and Wilf, the farmer who eats the same supper every day, and teaches Kiran that the cuckoo arrives in April and leaves in July. Meeting the locals also proved to be a big help in her 'healing' especially Wilf, who lived the simplest of lives and was more than content with his lot. I picked up this book as living away from the city is an aspiration but this book is about so much more. I fell in love with the Wales countryside, mountains and valleys as I related to the human and emotional stories of the protagonist experiencing new perspectives in family and surroundings.