Flesh and Blood is the first of seven novels which make up The Land of the Living, a sequence which is one of the finest achievements of Welsh writing in English. Amy Parry is the central character of the series, and it is her struggles and the trials and tribulations of her family and friends that provide the framework of a complex model of twentieth-century experience, centred for the most part on Welsh life. Flesh and Blood traces Amy's early life from the day she is adopted by her uncle and aunt before the First World War, until the end of her school-days. She is a pretty and demure child, an object of affection, apparently both clever and docile. However, as she grows up her ambiguous social status results in an emotional confusion which hardens into a bitter resentment of poverty and a determination to achieve and secure independence.