A diary with a difference

At the age of 20 Judith Thomas begins a diary covering June, 2007 to April, 2009. Initially reluctant to take up her father’s request to translate a 17th century Welsh ‘Testament’ written by a distant ancestor, Judith finds support in a Welsh language group leading to the collective unraveling of a story of love, bravery and destruction. Included in this story is the arrest and hanging of Judith’s cousin for witchcraft, the English Civil War and the plague in Eyam. The modern component of the book (interwoven with the historical) includes Judith’s loss of sexual innocence, her arrest for suspected terrorism, the recent economic turmoil and comment on our belief in mysticism and our continuing penchant for warfare. After completing the translation Judith discovers a lineage of her family living in the same farmhouse as the author of the Testament three-and-a-half centuries before. She also finds that genetic traits of her ancestors have lived on; she and her new-found ‘cousin’, Ann, share an uncommon ability to read truth or falsehood in people they meet and Ann has the same gift of song as her distant namesake.