Longlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2010.
Independent Welsh booksellers Christmas Book of the Month 2009.

It’s the 1920s. Airships, prohibition, Al Capone, talkies, gramophones, the Empire State building: the world across the pond is bursting with excitement and the future wide open for two small boys at home on their North Wales farm.

Eagerly they follow the progress of their father, famous Welsh tenor Jabez Trevor, as he tours North America season after season, the Welsh Imperial Singers packing concert halls coast to coast and their dad sending home postcards, letters and presents from Chicago, Winnipeg, New York…

Despite talk of bulls, bears and stock-market crashes, the Depression meant little to young brothers Alun and Arthur as they carved their initials into the sycamore tree below Hope Mountain; read Mark Twain and longed to see the great ships that would bring their father home.

Eight-year-old Arthur hated to read and write, sang like a songbird and wished only for a real leather case football like Dixie Dean. The future was wide open, but tragically for Arthur it never came any closer than the makeshift football pitch on the flat field at Pen-y-Wern farm.

Now, eighty years on, his brother Alun recalls those early days with a joyful immediacy in this haunting, music-filled memoir of a time long gone, but still glowing with life.

"Some voices have to be imagined singing to home across an ocean of exile as in a boy's longing for an absent father: some voices can be heard again, more widely, as in a man's poignantly funny recollection of a singing father's musical odyssey across 1920s America as the family waited and suffered in Wales. Entrancing and quite magical."
Dai Smith

Alun Trevor was brought up in Treddyn, Flintshire. His father Jabez Trevor (tenor) gave up coal-mining and took up full time singing as soloist with a group. Trevor has also published a bilingual picture-book, Cofio Cantorian: The Welsh Imperial Singers.