Coming Back Brockens – A year in a mining village –

“‘The best stories are often those closest to home. Mark Hudson’s previous book was an award-winning portrait of a village in Africa, and now he has produced a portrait of a village in England.
It is a place almost as remote – Horden – where his parents and grandparents lived and dug and brought up families. He stayed there for a year, and the result is a brilliant work, at once an intimate history of coal mining in the North-east, a spirited and wise personal memoir, and a pained description of an England that has all but exhausted itself’ Robert Winder, Independent”