“Anybody interested in the history of working class resistance, and people’s daily struggles when confronting deep poverty blighting post-industrial communities should read this devastating study”

-- Paul Mason

“Evans’ beautifully crafted words and thoughts are now seared into me forever. Sit with each chapter for a while as its true devastation dawns on you. Thank God these stories are now being told. The boy of the valleys has come home and roared.”

-- Lucy Easthope, author of When the Dust Settles: Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster

“A cliche-free, myth-lancing account of a ‘Coal Colony’ discarded by the powers that were after tearing use and relentless abuse. Sometimes lyrical, never romantic he offers analytical passion, acidic candour, some love, deep melancholy, dry mirth, scorn for nostalgia about ‘a past that never really existed’ and an unbreakable grip on truth.”

-- Neil Kinnock

“How Black Was My Valley is more than a memoir. Each carefully constructed sentence, every beautifully recorded or imagined moment, is placed alongside tragedy’s reality, ensuring that the ‘view from below’, as lived by the people who remain in the grip of economic marginalisation, is heard.”

--Phil Scraton, author of Hillsborough: The Truth