The village of Tanygraig on the Welsh-English border is the setting for this passionate novel of love and its consequences. Beti, the beautiful and wilful daughter of a pub landlord, is pursued by two men: Llew, her aggressive, red-haired cousin, and Evan, the dreamy miller and would-be poet. She has to make a choice but it's not her future alone that depends on her decision. She and Tanygraig are positioned precariously on borders of class, nation, language, and changing times. In this enduring novel by Geraint Goodwin, first published in 1936, Wales is associated with tradition and stability, England connotes modernity and movement. Beti is conscious of living at a temporal border: 'The old way of things was ending; she had come at the end of one age and the beginning of another. Wales would be the last to go but it was going...'
The poignant and subtle novella 'Arrivals' unfolds slowly, revealing a mother and daughter in opposite corners of the planet, both experiencing their own personal revelation.
A harsh contemporary novel set in an underprivileged area in south Wales, dealing with child abuse and the despair of the young generation who sink deeper into the maelstrom of sex and drugs. First published in 2000. Winner of the Orange Futures Award.
An experiment into the sources of the human brain through the mind of a young woman has gone horribly wrong. She has seen the great god Pan and will die giving birth to a daughter.Twenty years later, fêted society hostess Helen Vaughan becomes the source of much fevered speculation. Many men are infactuated with her beauty, but great beauty has a price, and sometimes you have to pay with the only thing you have left...The Great God Pan was a sensation when published in 1894. Its author, Arthur Machen, was a struggling unknown writer living in London. He had translated Casanova's memoirs and was living on a small inheritance. He immediately became one of the most talked-about writers of the last years of the nineteenth century, while the publications marked the start of his ongoing influence on modern fantasy and horror.
One of Merthyr's Victorian brickyard girls, Saran watches the world parade past her doorstep on the banks of the stinking and rat-infested Morlais Brook. The town changes and grows but Saran is still there for Glyn, for Harry, for her children.
Vic Brown is attracted to the beautiful but demanding Ingrid. As their relationship grows and changes he comes to terms - the hard way - with adult life and what it really means to love. Set in the 1960s.
Star-crossed lovers struggle against their families, upbringings and values in Hilda Vaughan's first and arguably finest novel, The Battle to the Weak.
An engaging novel set in Kenya during the 1990s. Kenya in 1996, Griff takes a job teaching at a small struggling school in Nairobi. How does a naive and privileged mzungu fit in? El Nino floods, bulldozed slums, street justice and widespread corruption, it is nearly impossible to work out what the hell is going on...
Offers a place for young scholars to submit new research. This book contains submissions of a comparative nature, as well as international participation including some research on Raymond Williams and essays on Rhys Davies, Edward Thomas and Glyn Jones.
This book may be considered as the second stage in the crucial campaign to raise the profile of Welsh writing in English both within Wales and in the wider world. The first stage was the foundation of the Library of Wales series.
1949: Egypt's struggle against its British occupiers moves towards crisis; Israel declares its statehood, driving out the Arabs. Joe Roberts, an RAF sergeant, his wife Ailsa and daughter, Nia, leave Wales for Egypt.
Featuring research by some of established critics in the field of Welsh writing in English, this title aims to engage in an informed way both with the Welsh literary past and with contemporary writing, looking outwards and towards the future.
A tale of passion, violence, cruelty and unexpected tenderness, Margiad Evans conjures a tempestuous and sometimes sinister world of small-town border life in the early twentieth century.
With a foreword by Phillip Pullman, Make Room for the Jester is a haunting journey from the edge of childhood into a threatening adult world. A remarkable and welcome rediscovery.
In "Love and Other Possibilities", Lewis Davies embarks on a journey that takes us into Sri Lanka, Wales, Spain, India, Morocco and the lives and minds of his characters. His spare prose metamorphoses the exotic into the familiar.
An artist at heart, Trystan Morgan grows up in his grandmother's valley mining cottage, duty-bound by her deep wish for him to be a preacher. He comes from farming stock and longs to paint the Welsh countryside of his people. But he agrees to study at the city university although his adolescent mind revolts at the social posturing around him. Trystan's journey through the conflicting cultural, social and political values of his country in the mid-twentieth century is bewildering but finally liberating. And through the glittering, crowded, kaleidoscopic images of this bravura novel, the author creates a rich impression of people and place; a Wales which is a landscape of the mind. Glyn Jones was one of the giants of twentieth-century Welsh writing whether as short story writer, critic or poet, and here in his remarkable novel of 1956, he creates a narrative of exceptional power that draws on all these gifts.
At the heart of Dai Country - the central valleys of twentieth-century South Wales from the 1930s to the 1970s - was the metropolis of Pontypridd, and it is from this vantage point in time and space that Alun Richards cast his baleful eye on the personal relationships and social ambitions of the inhabitants of this much-fabled country. In this compendium volume, the best of his short stories, as funny and savage as they are scathing and compassionate, are combined with his entrancing autobiographical memoir Days of Absence to take us to the core of those incomparable valleys, with their lived experience stripped bare for once of their usual cloak of cliche and sentiment.
Imagine a life of adventure, set in the world of second-hand books: finding a valuable first edition gathering dust on a Parisian pub shelf, opening bookshops in Montpellier, Paris, Bangor, trading books with a holidaying Ian McEwan or Alan Sillitoe, and running for the door after finding yourself trespassing in a wealthy Moroccan's private library...
Driving to the seaside together are a young girl on the verge of womanhood, her mother and her stepfather with his son. But this is no ordinary trip. There's something sinister about Evan Charlton, and all too soon the girl is plunged into a nightmare world that she cannot understand. This debut collection of short stories by the award-winning writer and journalist Nigel Jarrett brings together places of violence, longing, helplessness and vivid remembrance, where characters must cope with the darker side of human relationships, often inside the seemingly cosy world of the family. From the Rhys Davies Prize-Winning story about a married Japanese woman risking a scandalous love-affair to a hotel in 1940s post-war Switzerland, Nigel's stories explore romance with tragedy, family with madness and the lives of people with a warm and tender humour.
We all like choosing the best-ever rugby team, but here is a XV with a difference. A team of fifteen writers, not players, describe the exploits of the people's heroes from Gould to Gareth Edwards. The beauty and exhilaration of the game is vividly recaptured in some classic prose. So too are the emotions and expectations of the most passionate followers in the world. They deserve the best team we can put out. Here it is, a selection of world-beating writing on British rugby.
A worker is killed in the striking coalfields of Wales. Some months later a government minister thought to be connected with the death is also shot. Lewis Redfern, once a radical, now a political analyst and journalist, pursues the sniper, a lonely hunt that leads him through an imbroglio of Civil Service leaks and international wheelings and dealings to a secret organization: a source of insurrection far more powerful than anyone could have suspected - the world of the Volunteers. A compelling thriller, The Volunteers is also an engrossing reminder of the conflict between moral choice and political loyalty. Through his obsessive pursuit of justice, overcoming bluff and counter-bluff, Redfern finally encounters the truth about himself.
