Review: Cloudless
Author: Rupert Dastur
By: Maureen Kelly, Sunnybank Hills, Queensland
Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Autumn 2004 - in a farmhouse in Wales a family waits for their son to return from the Iraqi war. He had enlisted for a chance to win a university scholarship, then the war erupted. His parents are devastated and are constantly worried for his welfare. There are also many other concerns to be addressed at home: the workload of the farm, escalating debts, a gambling addiction and marital infidelity.

Rupert Dastur has succeeded in writing an extraordinary and engaging story of a Welsh family in turbulent times. The book is written in a brilliant, emotional but not overly sentimental style. The descriptive passages of the Welsh landscape are outstanding. The relentless cold is well described, I could sense the wintry conditions as the tension increased in each chapter of the story.

The characters in the book have strong individual personalities; as the story unfolded I formed a bond with each of the family members. The author has skilfully portrayed the impact of events on those characters. Chapters are interspersed with commentary and statistics on the state of the Iraqi conflict, including lives lost. The impassive commentary provides a sharp contrast to the emotional roller coaster experienced by the characters in the story, and is a very effective tool in conveying the lack of empathy shown by authorities.

I was fully engaged and immersed in the narrative. Overall it was a compelling story, and I would unconditionally recommend the book to all readers who enjoy contemporary fiction. The military theme in the novel will appeal to readers of that genre.

Cloudless by Rupert Dastur his debut novel is a poignant story of a troubled family who eke a living from their farm in Llandudno set in 2004 which brought a lump in my throat as the parents John and Catrin tried to save their marriage, John the Father has a gambling habit, their older son Harri aged only sixteen fighting a war in Iraq and the angst of waiting for him to return home the agony of waiting for his letters to arrive which they devoured. Their youngest son Rhys is at the teenage rebellious stage and is not getting on well at his school and adds more stress for his parents. Also Catrin's old flame Matthew comes back into her life and she begins to think that the grass may well be greener if she decides to leave John for him.

I loved the way Rupert Dastur describes the harsh reality of running a farm which was becoming a burden as John's gambling addiction spirals putting them all in jeopardy. Also the love the family feels for the animals on their farm. I loved the description of the wild flowers, the different cloud names and description. The blood sweat and tears along with the memories of happier times for this troubled family going through turbulent times was such a moving story.
Release date 27/02/25

Set against the backdrop of Autumn 2004, Cloudless transports readers to a farmhouse nestled in the hills outside Llandudno, where a family endures the agonising wait for their son to return from Iraq. His decision to enlist has sent shockwaves through the household, leaving them grappling with their fears and uncertainties. Meanwhile, the day-to-day realities of managing their ancestral farmland and caring for their troubled younger son weigh heavily on them.

John, the father, succumbs to his gambling habit, pushing the family farm closer to bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Catrin, the devoted mother, embarks on an affair with an old flame from the city, offering her a glimpse of a life starkly different from her own. As each family member clings to their fragile lifelines, they become increasingly estranged from one another, culminating in one fateful knock at the door.

The novel is dark and brooding, capturing the relentless pressure faced by the characters in their spiralling circumstances. The author masterfully immerses readers in the family's turmoil, evoking a palpable sense of entrapment in a situation that feels devoid of escape. Cloudless is an intense exploration of familial bonds and the lengths individuals will go to find solace amidst chaos.

Read more at The Secret Bookreview.

A very well plotted and written story of a Welsh farming family, set during the time of the Iraq war when Tony Blair was Prime Minister. All of the family are facing hard times, and are keeping secrets from each other. There are excerpts from the Chilcott report throughout which add a touch of realism. . The tension builds to a head as Jimmy and Liz find out what has been happening in each other's lives. Without revealing the plot lines, I felt the ending was satisfactory, although maybe a bit too neat? A very good first novel.

Rupert Dastur’s Cloudless is a beautifully written debut novel. Set on a north Wales farm, where harsh weather and the difficulty of making a living from farming make for a hard life. We see the world through John and Catrin’s eyes, husband and wife with their own personal struggles; and Harri, who won a scholarship from the army before the Iraq war. Ab intricate portrait of one family juxtaposed with the political realities of the Chilcott enquiry.

A beautifully written debut novel from Rupert Dastur. I loved the description of farming life and the insight into the struggles the family have. The inclusion of excerpts from the Chilcot report was quite poignant and helped to put Harri’s story into perspective. Not to give anything away though I did think the ending was too tidy.
In all though I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

This is an interesting debut; well written with an unusual setting. It’s very much a slow burn. Husband ad wife run a farm in North Wales. They’re struggling financially and the farmer sees gambling as a way out of his mounting debt. His wife is a drudge. She had more to offer than a life cut off from society and she turns to an old flame for omfort. In the meantime, only son is away at war and the threat of his possible death o injury hangs like a black shadow over day to day life.

This is quite a bleak and difficult tale. Life is had and there’s no easy way out but Dastur skilfully explores the impact of the daily grind on each of the characters. I didn’t find it uplifting as a story; there’s a brutal scene which has lingered with me and taken on perhaps too much significance. I think Dastur has captured the hardship and bleakness well. These are people I’ve come across in real life and they exist much as depicted. Interesting overall and beautifully written, I’d look for more from this author.

I enjoyed this book set just outside the town where my mother lives.
I was very frustrated by the intransigence of the man of the house. I have known a lot of Welsh farmers, and the depiction was true to life. The wife deserved so much better from both the men in her life.
If I have one complaint, it's with the utterly cruel and superfluous scene where the son kills the beautiful bird.
I felt that it detracted from everything else that happens in the story.

This is a dark, lyrical novel about a married couple in North Wales whose son is serving in the Middle East. Their marriage is under strain and Catrin has reconnected with a lover from her youth while John has become addicted ti gambling.

The writing about rural life is both poetic and brutal. As someone who has never lived this life I found this fascinating and beautiful to read about. Its a great depiction of the harrowing struggles that farmers face n the 21st century as well as being a treatise on the futility of war and the effect of this on families.

The author's prose is poetic but also understated. Its a slow burning story with a slow reveal of high human drama.

I look forward to reading more by this writer.

Cloudless by Rupert Dastur is an insightful debut about characters struggling with various issues that impact their lives and family.

This is a story of family secrets - secret addictions, secret affairs and secret loves. The setting is a farm in North Wales run by husband-and-wife team, John and Catrin. John is struggling to make the farm pay its way. He is drawn into gambling as a way of making money to pay off debts. Catrin is a talented musician and composer but who has become a housewife and farm helper.

The third principal character is the elder son, Harri, who has calculated that his best chance of a career is to take up an Army scholarship at university, serve for the required time and the leave for a life in civvy street. But his plan had been upended because the year is 2004 and Harri has been sent to fight in the Iraq war.

But for the first half of the book, Harri is never present but away on the front-line. We learn about him from the thoughts of his parents, John and Catrin and his letters home. There is a framing device in which extracts from BBC News and the Chilcot Inquiry are interposed into the main narrative taking place in North Wales. Ironically, because the writing of these characters and the North Wales setting is so good and so alive, the dry factual text of these interpolations is of little interest. I suspect that most readers will, like I did, simply skip over these extracts so as to get back to the real-life stories. These are riveting and very well-written. Dry statistics? Not so much. But Harri does make it home and we catch sight of his relationship with Simon, a farmhand.

I found the final 5% of this novel to be quite out of step with the preceding narrative. This is a story of difficult lives lived with secrets and stresses in a harsh environment but the concluding sections segued into ‘a satisfying ending’. Did the author feel he needed to achieve an ending of mellow resolution whereby people walk away holding hands? It seemed just too emotionally rosy and seemed to be the ending from a different type of novel.

But this is a novel full of very good characterisations and brilliantly insightful showing the tough life of a sheep farmer and of a soldier on the frontline. The author shows a woman facing the emotional conflict between loyalty and self-fulfilment.

This is a quite brilliant debut novel and we can look forward to a second novel where the author will have moved on and away from that sheep farm in North Wales.
My thanks go to Fig Tree of Penguin Books for making available a pre-publication copy so that I might write an honest and unbiased review.

I was not expecting to enjoy this book as much as I did . It is about a family of Welsh sheepfarmers who are eking out an existance in 2004 . The elder son received a scholarship for university from the army and is now in Iraq on tour. In the first chapters, John and Catrin (the parents) and Rhys, who is still at school all have their own difficulties and are all missing Harri . There is not a lot of action, but the descritption paints a difficult existance in the wintertime where the family members are growing apart and financial problems are mounting up.
I suppose in some way , Harri's timeout at home is a turning point in the book. I had been hooked into the plot by this point and reading the book was less of a chore. I was not keen on the official reports at the start of the chapters but did like the switching viewpoints telling the story . The characters are well portrayed without lengthy descriptions. So although it took a few chapters to get into the book and the downwards spiral of family life in places, the book does a turnaround and life becomes more hopeful. Definately a book which requires a lot of thought rather than a quick read.
Thanks to Net Galley for the ARC

A study of a family torn apart by the pressures of history, both in the long and short term. John and Catrin are eking out an existence on a sheep farm in the hills above Llandudno. The farm is failing and so is their marriage. John is hiding secrets and the pressure on Catrin to keep everything and everyone together means that soon, so is she. As well as the farm there is the worry about their sons, Harri is in the army and now the Iraq war flares into life around them. Rhys is at school, safe but unsettled, dealing with things he doesn't want to talk about. In the shadows of secrets and fear, the family starts to fall apart. Can they survive, as individuals and as a family?

Dark and brooding, this is pretty unrelenting in places. The author does a great job of piling on the pressure and making you, the reader, feel like one of the characters, trapped in a situation which seems like there is no way out of.

Set in 2004, Cloudless is about a family of four living in a farm in the Welsh countryside who are coping with the recent departure of their son, Harri, who is on a tour of duty in Iraq. The novel is told from multiple perspectives and builds a picture of a fractured, unhappy couple whose relationship is disintegrating.

Whilst I enjoyed the evocative setting of the farm, I didn't engage as much with the detailed descriptions of farming and equipment, The husband seemed selfish and it was difficult to develop empathy for him. I'm not quite sure what was missing for me as I couldn't fault the writing itself. It was perhaps more of an 'interior' narrative than I like,

I'd certainly recommend others to try the book as it was well written and, for the right reader, could be really enjoyable.

This is a well-written novel. The characters are not likeable, but that's as it should be in this particular case. They are highly flawed individuals — and thus uniquely human — living difficult lives, battling hardship and complicated relationships that are shaped by the austere environment of rural Wales and the circumstances in which they exist at the beginning of the 21st century.

A debut that has proved worth reading. I look forward to future novels by this author,

Many thanks to the publishers and to Netgalley for the ARC.

A family farming saga, with the usual worries over keeping land for the next generation, with rather too much(for me) of the tedious minutiae of farm and livestock chores. Each of the characters is suffering from some personal problem, gambling, infidelity, unfulfilled expectations, then add in a son gone off to war and it adds up to a rather depressing book. I didn’t feel the need for chapter introductions with Iraq war reports, and in fact skimmed past them, I did in fact skim through an awful lot of mundane detail.
I was interested in how things would play out, but never really felt invested with any of the characters, many of them seemed too stereotypical, like the city boy in his blue shirt and chinos who is the romantic competition of the piece.

Set in 2004 against the backdrop of the Iraq war this is a family story set in Wales. Catrin and John run a Welsh hill farm that has been in John's family for years but they are struggling to make ends meet. At first it appears this is the struggle is due to the farm not making money but it emerges that John has a serious gambling addiction and has built up thousands of pound worth of debt. Against this background an old friend of Catrin's reappears and she and Matthew reignite their relationship. The eldest son, Harri, has just been sent to Iraq as the army sponsored his stint at university, and the youngest son, Rhys, is playing up at school.
All in all the family is struggling, each with their own problems and against the backdrop of the decline in sheep farming, the weather, and the harsh Welsh landscape. The descriptions of farm and the setting ring true and well written but I found the plot predictable and I didn't bond closely with any of the characters closely enough to be fully invested in their outcome. I also found the clips from the Chilcott report unneccesary and after reading the first few I simply skipped over the rest - I prefer the political implications of things to written into a story rather than as a background.
Bleak, brutal and well written but missing something to grip me.
With thanks to Netgalley and Fig Tree, Penguin Random House UK for an arc copy in return for an honest review.

I enjoyed the beautiful prose, the vivid depictions of the natural landscapes and the raw humanity of the characters. What truly brought this book to life for me, however, are the juxtaposing sources of tension and how they entwine as the story develops. First there are the uncontrollable elements: the vagaries of climate, disease, and the harsh realities of nature, all of which threaten the farm's viability and place constant stress on the family. Then there's the impact of the Iraq War, a man-made catastrophe whose arbitrary and senseless nature is conveyed through excerpts from the final Iraq/Chilcot public inquiry report. Finally the story layers the human responses and frailties that appear to straddle the line between being within and beyond human control. Issues like addiction, attraction and misunderstanding seem both self-inflicted yet inherent to the character's nature. Rupert Dastur deftly weaves these elements together into a profoundly human narrative. Special thank you to Fig Tree, Penguin, Random House UK and NetGalley for a no obligation advance digital review copy.

I absolutely loved everything about this novel, which, ostensibly, covers the lives of a 'normal', everyday family. Set in Wales in 2004, the story follows John, who struggles with debts, and who resorts to gambling to sort it out. Wife, Catrin, discontent having shirked her music career to be a 'farmer's wife' has an affair with an ex-boyfriend, and as if that's not dramatic enough, son Harri has joined the army and is in Iraq. Because of Harri's growing fear, revealed in his letters, the family have to pull together, especially after the younger son gets into trouble at school. What I love about this novel (pretty much everything) is that often this kind of story takes over at the expense of the quality of writing. Not so here. Dastur is an absolutely brilliant writer. Can't recommend highly enough. Grateful to NetGalley and the publisher for the privilege of the ARC.

I mainly wanted to read this as I know the area the novel is set in. While I enjoyed it while I was reading it, nothing about it struck me as particularly new or interesting, it was all a bit predictable and the characters felt a bit flat and lifeless. Some of the writing was beautiful though.