The Bonesetter of Bryn Moel

About this book

Anglesey, May 1977. While Britain hangs bunting for the Silver Jubilee, seventy-nine-year-old Ifan Pritchard, last of five generations of island bonesetters, slips in his own cowshed and breaks his hip. He has never spent a night in a hospital bed. Now he lies on a men's orthopaedic ward in Bangor, and a young registrar from Lahore, Dr Tariq Rafiq, has to persuade him to let a surgeon put a steel pin into him. Ifan refuses. His daughter Gwenllian cannot understand why her father would rather risk dying than consent. Neither can Tariq, who carries a family craft of his own he has never admitted to. The answer lies sixty years back, in the mud of the Ypres Salient, where a nineteen-year-old stretcher-bearer once made a choice about a wounded stranger that he has never spoken of. Now, flat on his back, he may have to.