Hitchens on his formative book

It's How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewllyn.

[It] was a book that changed my life in two ways, or possibly three. When I first took hold of it, at the age of about fourteen, I was seeking that span of writing that connects boys' books to adult reading - in the same way that one 'took on' Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene at about the same period. The book was long, and it was a sort of triumph to have addressed and mastered such a hefty text at all. But that cannot be the reason why I read it and re-read it until the paperback fell to pieces, or why I got to the point where I knew every scene in the book and loved it all the more for its certainty and familiarity.

...

Some moments of it will always be with me: the father made to stand in the rain 'like a dog', so that the bosses can humiliate him in front of his children; the bare-knuckle boxing-match; the older brothers' revenge on the sadistic sell-out of a schoolteacher; the colliery accident; the astonishing emphasis on food in both its plenty and its absence; that moment up on the mountainside with the girl. And then the introduction to Welsh names and idioms, and the shock I felt when one of the brothers declares his intention 'to fight against the bloody English'.