The beautiful and hardy herds of the Welsh valleys act as a counterpoint to three decades of change in photographer Ken Grant’s images

Ken Grant’s Cwm: A Fair Country, a collection of nearly 30 years of landscape photography in the South Walian valleys, begins with a moving prologue. It mentions a painting he’s known since his Liverpudlian childhood, still sitting above his 92-year-old father’s mantelpiece: “Dapple-bruised Welsh horses, painted in a loose herd, are imagined beneath a sky that promises rain.”

From 1998, on commutes from Liverpool to the University of Wales, Newport (where he led a documentary photography degree), he noticed similar horses – completely by coincidence. “I didn’t seek them out at first, but on my drives, I soon got aware that they were there. Sometimes up a valley’s road, you’d see packs of 40 or 50.”

The Guardian journalist’s tender account of how music became a bridge between him and his autistic son, James, is full of wit and wisdom

Halfway through Maybe I’m Amazed, there’s a photograph of John Harris’s son, James, with one of his heroes. James is a young-looking 10 in knee-length shorts decorated with stars. Ian Hunter of 1970s rock band Mott the Hoople stands beside him, a hand gently around his shoulder. “Sixty-nine years separate them,” Harris writes. “Here is proof of how songs and their creators find fans in the most unlikely of places.”

Maybe I’m Amazed is the story of a growing child’s love of music, but it’s more than that: it’s also about how songs provided a whole world for James, and his family, after his autism diagnosis. It marks a departure for Harris, whose previous journalism, aside from his political work for the Guardian, has involved editing magazines and writing columns, reviews and other books about music.