Runt
By: Niall Griffiths.
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Published: 2007
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 148
ISBN-13: 9780224071239
Subjects: Savants (Savant syndrome) -- Wales -- Fiction.; Farmers -- Wales -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Description: On leaving school, a 16 year-old boy goes to live with his uncle on a remote Welsh hill-farm. His aunt recently committed suicide after losing her livestock in the foot-and-mouth epidemic and his uncle has turned, once again, to the bottle. The boy is an innocent, a spiritual savant; his uncle sees him as a shaman. An unwitting repository of folk memory, he is a boy from the margins: barely educated but possessed of extraordinary insights; barely literate but able to speak a language of his own - a poetry laden with Pagan and Christian myth. He is unaware that he is gifted, unaware of what he knows in general - which is probably for the best since the enormity of his knowledge, were it to be understood, would crush him...