Search results for ""parthian books""

In Phenomena (translated from the Latvian, Paradibas) Eduards Aivars' wry observations transform the mundanity of the everyday into words of quiet, thought-provoking beauty. Following his innovative principle of composition, the collection features many poems with long, expositional titles, which then culminate in a select few words, for example, 'The sad tale of the long-anticipated air pump', or 'The intense, but fleeting urge for domesticity and commitment'. Aivars talks about people, love and the life of a poet in this witty, reflective and unique collection. Phenomena is part of the 'Parthian Baltic' project. The project was launched at the Parthian poetry festival at the Wheatsheaf and the London Book Fair 2018 (focus region: Baltics).

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Fragments of a Jigsaw: Portraits of Artists and Writers of Wales is an unprecedented collection of photos by Bernard Mitchell who has compiled a gallery of notable characters within the Arts community in Wales. Fragments of a Jigsaw: Portraits of Artists and Writers of Wales is based on the on-going Welsh Arts Archive project. The project began in 1966 with a series of portraits of the Swansea friends of Dylan Thomas, including the artists Ceri Richards and Alfred Janes, the poet Vernon Watkins and the composer Daniel Jones. The collection kept growing: since 1990, Bernard Mitchell has added many artists who have since passed away, including, Will Roberts, Josef Herman, John Petts, Ivor Roberts Jones, John Elwyn, David Tinker and Ernest Zobole. The work continues with the artists working today. In 1999, a large exhibition of photographs of artists was held at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Photographs are also held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, The National Museum of Wales, Cardiff and the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea. This is a unique collection of photo-portraits from the Welsh arts scene.For more information on the Welsh Arts Archive project, visit bernardmitchell. co.uk/welsharts-archive/.

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In What I Know I Cannot Say / All That Lies Beneath, Dai Smith combines a novella and a linked section of short stories to create a dazzling fictional synthesis that takes the reader on a tour of the South Wales Valleys during the twentieth century. Picking up where his 2013 novel Dream On left off, What I Know I Cannot Say follows the life story of Billy's father, Dai Maddox. When Billy's former partner Bran shows up wanting to record Dai's life story to put together a documentary, Dai looks back on his past, remembering his childhood as a destitute orphan, his work as a collier in the mines and the subsequent drifting between menial jobs, alleviated only by reading and drawing; his enrolment in the British Army and participation in the invasion of Italy during the Second World War; and post-war life under socialism, when he was back in the pits and married to Billy's mother, Mona.Moving from the heyday of the pre-mechanised coal industry to the present day, What I Know I Cannot Say presents a moving and vivid panorama of twentieth-century Wales, brought to life by Smith's meticulous attention to historical detail and distinct gift of invoking the smells, sights and sounds of the past. We find ourselves smelling the cordite of ammunition among the ruins of Cassino in 1943, during the invasion of Italy; the damp coal in the mineshafts; the beer-soaked wood of pub floors; the smell of fresh coffee from a modern percolator. Dai's journey is an emotional and moving one, told in gritty, realistic prose.All That Lies Beneath is white-knuckle fiction ride: power, sex, money and ambition all twist through the pages as Smith creates a feast of intellectual and physical provocation in stories that send a shudder of fearful recognition directly through to the reader.

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Beautiful widow Joan D'Silva is at Howrah Station, fleeing Calcutta with her 11-year-old son Errol. Also on the same train is Laxhimi, a notorious hijira prostitute: charismatic, sensual and powerful. They are both running away to Lucknow to escape danger, but soon their lives will become entangled in a web of corruption and blackmail. Who is responsible for the poisoning at the factory? Is it the Workers Revolutionary Movement, the Children of God under the sway of the charismatic Swami Naik, or someone else entirely? If only the police could help. But Detective Inspector Mallothra has based his investigative style on Mickey Spillane novels so it's down to Joan, her friends, and of course Errol, to unmask the perpetrator. With a cast of colourful characters, this new novel by Glen Peters is inspired by his youth in the dwindling Anglo-Indian community. It is a witty, vivid tale of intrigue, immersed in the sights, sounds, smells and especially the tastes of 1960s India.

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Berlin, October 1933. Max Dienst has returned to the city he last knew as a student. He has been asked to cover the elections to the Reichstag. A colleague on the paper mentions the case of Geli Raubal, a young singer from Vienna who died in mysterious circumstances in the flat of her uncle. There is a botched death certificate but is it a hidden murder? Max thinks he may have a story, her uncle is the leader of a growing political party, a man who seeking to change Germany and Europe. Her uncle is Adolf Hitler. Berlin is also the city of his youth when he was in love with a young Russian communist and embroiled in all the new ideas of change and idealism. Ten years later Max is married to Rhiannon and a journalist for a respected newspaper. Rhiannon works at the British Embassy. She is approached by the mysterious Sid Khan, he may have information that would be useful to her husband. Max was a member of the communist party in his youth. Max wants to find the truth in a time when everyone has their own version, but are there secrets that are best forgotten?

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"A world of green: a new and weird world of grim, dark shadows and frenzied activity; of conflicting sounds varying from the roar and thunder of overhead gantries, the sharp, shrill staccato beat of automatic hammers, to the echoing ring of steel upon steel, and the hollow wheezing and thumping of the hydraulic moulding machines".Starting as an apprentice at Bevan's foundry, Ieuan Morgan enters a new and testing world. His colleagues soon turn out to be his tormentors while life at home is not without its challenges. It is hard for the young man to sustain his dreams of one day being a writer, and of a better world. Things have to get worse before getting better so unemployment casts its long shadow over the town. But the lay-offs give the gifted Ieuan time to read and think and on a visit to the fair to meet Sally, a gentle, consumptiveyoung woman from the wrong side of the tracks.With this, his destiny changes course. Written with a deep authenticity born from bitter experience, William Glynne-Jones depicts life in the fictional town of Abermor and especially the daily grind of foundry life, in a workplace fraught with dangers. Farewell Innocence is a heartfelt and affecting account of a young man's rites of passage in hard times.

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"The foundry was working at full pressure. In spite of the dismal conditions - the stifling heat, the silica dust that hung in clouds in the air, the crude ventilation, and the strenuous labour - the men seemed happy and companionable. A certain measure of security had come at last after the long years of unemployment; the dread of the dole was behind them".Life in the foundry is changing Ieuan Morgan, whose hands, once familiar only with the feel of books are now dark, knotted and fiercely strong. He dreams of writing and the day his young love Sally will come home from the convalescence home. When that day arrives Ieuan's life starts to feel complete and marriage only deepens that conviction. But much longed for success with hiswriting brings with it new temptations, when Stella Courtland, the sophisticated editor of a fashionable magazine enters the young man's life.Ride the White Stallion is the sequel to Farewell Innocence, charting the trials and travails of Ieuan Morgan at the foundry and in his family life. It is an account of a young man's creative awakening amid the challenges of domestic penury and downright hard graft. A portrait of an industrial town as well as a convincing character study, Ride the White Stallion is shot through with truth and honesty, twin hallmarks of Glynne-Jones's work.

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Harry Selwyn is a master of detachment - from the realities of the past, from his own ageing body, and from his conscience. Even the sudden death of his wife is not allowed to interfere with the daily routine. He must prepare for tomorrow's race. He must return his ill-fitting trousers to the shop. And death will have to wait.

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A novel that spans the twentieth century and introduces a litany of unforgettable characters, For Those Who Come After is a study in myth-making, of familial bonds, and the destructive tides of enduring love.

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Wikipedia-obsessed cats, deleted tweets, James Franco's mother, west Wales, and Barcelona. Both bleak and joyously optimistic, All The Places We Lived is a collection of disparate, yet inextricably connected stories that are bound by the common threads that exist amongst young people in and out of love with each other and life in the twenty-first century. Whether keenly awaiting an imagined terror attack in a twenty-third floor glass box hotel, wandering Catalonian art galleries, or two AM jogging on pitch-black A-roads, solitude is never a truly concrete experience. There is always someone else: someone to buy a dilapidated rural house with, someone to laugh with, someone to get fired with, someone to fight with, someone to ride bikes with. Richard Owain Roberts has assembled a debut collection of contemporary fiction that is minimalist, confrontational, delicate, and, relentlessly, the absolute unfiltered truth.

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'Tumult and disorder, frustration, wages, strikes, riots, debts - were these to be his world? Ugliness, squalor and meanness was their portion. And yet, and yet ...They had the full tarnished brilliance of life in them. And he began to laugh, with a soft low sound, half caught in his throat.' The second novel in the Rhondda Trilogy - 'the most sustained literary examination of Welsh industrial history ever published and certainly the least ideologically distorted' - A Time to Laugh (1937) is set in a coal-mining valley on the eve of the 20th century. It is set against a background of industrial unrest and social change. The old certainties of pastoral Rhondda have given way to a new age of capital and steam, and life in the Valley has been transformed by strike, riot and gruelling poverty. The central character is Dr Tudor Morris, whose ancient estate has been sold to one of the railway companies opening up the Rhondda for the purpose of extracting coal and taking it down the Valley to the docks in Cardiff. The doctor abandons his class and seeks personal salvation among the poor. Although expressly radical in its sympathy for the working class, the novel also finds a place for local tradespeople, the small shopocracy to which Davies's family (grocers in Blaenclydach near Tonypandy) belonged: they remain neutral, non-political, with their livelihoods threatened, hapless bystanders in the social upheaval of the day. Like Rhys Davies himself, they are mere observers of the strike, which is based on the Haulers' Strike of 1893 and the Cambrian Combine Lock-out, here set in December 1899, that led to the famous Tonypandy Riots of 1910. The novel's emphasis is on collective responsibility rather than personal revolt as depicted in Davies's earlier novels, though he remains wary of Socialist ideology and the mentality it breeds. As for the Communists, they are seen as propagandists rather than the socially vital force they actually were in places like 'red Rhondda'.

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Have you been chosen to chair a group or a meeting for the first time? In the Chair is a practical, up-to-date and comprehensive guide to how to become the successful Chair of any body, whether it's the organisation you work for, a community group or charity, or a public or company Board. What qualities and skills do you need? How should you approach your group and its members? How should you prepare for and conduct meetings? How do you arrive at decisions, and cope with difficult situations and people? Inside you will find invaluable advice on chairing formal Boards and working with Chief Executives, as well as how to approach special kinds of meeting, including formal and public meetings, conferences, appointment panels, bilingual meetings and videoconferences. In the Chair will benefit anyone keen to make participating in groups and meetings a productive and enjoyable experience.

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Dream On is a composite novel: part black comedy and flashlight noir thriller, part meditation on the stories that connect up the frayed wires in the business of living. There's Digger Davies and his one cap for Wales and ultimately untimely death...the award winning photographer whose return home will become a quest for his own forgotten identity and compromised life...the thwarted politician in a hospital bed writing his own obituary...and a beautiful girl caught in time, alive in an old man's memory...

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Wiltshire 1860: One year after Darwin's explosive publication of The Origin of Species, sisters Anna and Beatrice Pentecost awaken to a world shattered by science, radicalism and the stirrings of feminist rebellion; a world of charismatic religious movements, Spiritualist seances, bitter loss and medical trauma. Fetishist of working women Arthur Munby, irascible antiquary General Pitt Rivers, feminist Barbara Bodichon and other historical figures of the Victorian epoch wander through the backdrop of the novel, as Anna's anomalous love for Lore Ritter and her friendship with freethinking and ambitious Miriam Sala carry her into areas of uncharted desire - while Beatrice, forced to choose between her beloved Will Anwyl and the evangelist Christian Ritter, who marked her out as a wife when she was only a child, is pulled between passion and duty. Each is riven by inner contradictions, but who will survive when the sisters fall into a fatal conflict with one another?

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New York, May, 1950. A warm Spring day and a short, and portly, thirty-five year old Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, pushes through the plush revolving doors of Harper's Bazaar, in the heart of bustling downtown Manhattan. He was taking a chance on offering 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', a prose piece that had already served him well, but Harper's were not to know that. There, he meets Miss Pearl Kazin, Fiction Editor, highly-educated and out to make her own mark on New York; a woman, vastly different in manner, substance and background to his other New York 'lady-friends', with whom he fell in love, with consequences that were to disturb him profoundly for more than a year. An intense and passionate relationship began on that day. One side of their correspondence has survived, six 'love letters', never before published, sent from Dylan to Pearl. Until these letters came to light Pearl had remained something of a ghost; now, they offer part of Dylan's side of the story.

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When Dorothy set off on a night out with her sister she never dreamt it would lead to a car journey to Baghdad; but that night she met a dark, mysterious stranger - an Iraqi student named Zane- and almost before she knew it they were married and driving to Baghdad in a borrowed car with their baby daughter, Summer. They moved into a house in the suburbs with Zane's family, throwing Dorothy into the maelstrom of Iraqi culture: letters could take weeks to arrive, there were no mobile phones or computers and there was no direct dial facility to the UK - she might as well have been living on the moon. Between Two Rivers is an honest, funny and moving memoir of Baghdad life from the perspective of a young woman from England transplanted into another culture by love.

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Philomena is a born rebel, disillusioned with her middle-class comfort and the expectations of her parents. Nestor is an impoverished African exile with the heart of a poet. When the two meet by chance on the streets of 1960s Bombay, their attraction will change their lives forever. Spanning two continents and following a story of love, loss and politics set against a backdrop of turbulent societies, times and allegiances, God on Every Wind is a powerful debut novel exploring the possibilities and limitations of individual and political revolution.

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A paid assassin called Krink loads up on viper-spit to tackle some uber-thugs; the governor of a prison ship introduces his inmates to haute cuisine; a farmer wakes up after an avalanche in north Wales to find he's the last man alive. The stories in this zany new collection range freely, almost chaotically, from the taiga region of northern Russia to the depths of despair. They are fuelled by a high octane imagination and an uncommon zest for language. A thrilling collection from a stunningly original voice. A journey in stories through a fabulous and fascinating fictional new world.

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Stalking Paloma is award-winning poet Ifor Thomas's follow-up to his Welsh Book of the Year shortlisted Body Beautiful. Central to this collection is an arresting and original sequence exploring the obsessive nature of fandom and its pursuit through social media. Staking out the territories of Facebook and Twitter, Thomas is witness to the interplay of intimacy and alienation which has increasingly come to define twenty-first century life. Elsewhere, his other preoccupations come to the fore: the changing face of Cardiff, negotiations with the past, mortality, and poetry - and the personalities that populate his art. With a love of the noir and a sly, mordant wit, Thomas delivers a performance as entertaining as it is essential.

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Widely regarded as one of the most readable, humorous and poignant autobiographies available today. Goodbye, Twentieth Century incorporates his acclaimed first volume of autobiography, A Poet in the Family, and in this new edition from the Library of Wales brings his life up to the present day and the outset of a new century.

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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.

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John Tripp had a chameleon genius which enlivened the literary life of Wales for nearly three decades. Poet, short story writer and journalist, he was an outspoken and often controversial writer. Charming, abrasive, lyrical and satirical, 'The Meaning of Apricot Sponge' is essential reading for anyone concerned with Wales and the roots of its contemporary identity. His wit and sharply observed social and political comments enriched debate, publications and broadcasts at that most crucial time in the struggle for self- rule in Wales. 'The Meaning of Apricot Sponge' is the first publication of Tripp's work to represent his poetry, fiction, journalism and creative non-fiction. This is a generous, fully annotated selection across these genres with an illuminating Introduction by Tony Curtis and a Foreword by Peter Finch, two of Tripp's friends and collaborators. Both writers also contribute poems dedicated to John Tripp.

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The old valleys have got something flying about in them beside the coal dust...Voices of the Children is a delicate and heartfelt story of the golden, ephemeral, uncertain world of childhood. Set in a rural mining village in South Wales in the years leading up to the Second World War, George Ewart Evans has recreated a magical but alive world that will resonate with our memories, real and imagined, of childhood. The hills were freedom, and the valley was the shop, milking the cow, errands, difficult customers, and, last of all, the new baby.

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Tai lives in Tremorfa. He likes fishing and the Troll who lives at the bottom of Mrs Griffiths garden. He's never told anyone about the troll. Illustrated by a Welsh International Sportswoman, this is the first in a trilogy of "Troll" books. In an age of I-pods and downloadable movies there is a refreshing air of the simplicity and excitement in a days fishing and pure imagination. This work will appeal to any little boy with a pocket full of shells, pebbles and elastic bands.

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Sport is one of our consuming passions, and its literature is rich and extensive. This original and enjoyable anthology brings together for the very first time the finest writing on Welsh sport by some of our most acclaimed authors - novelists, short-story writers, journalists, historians and poets. Its wide-ranging selection of fiction, non-fiction and verse reminds us that sport, like literature, is not only about itself but also about life, and sometimes death, and the human meaning of both.

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Simon has come to the house to interview its famous resident, a reclusive artist known simply as Charles. the house is remarkable, its profound beauty born from a combination of high technology and artistic flair. But the house also turns out to be a place of danger, a prison and a laboratory, holding secrets both dark and luminous which will challenge Simon's very notion of who he is and why he exists. Still Life is an intense drama that explores how science is challenging our moral universe and what it is that makes us human.

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Nicky is heavily pregnant and should be looking forward to a new home-life. But her mother-in-law has other plans. Ethan's plans do not involve his mother - until he's expecting his second child and things come full circle. Alec is playing at hating his neighbour's extreme Christmas decorations, up to the moment love strikes and changes all the rules. A young dad's impatient care transforms to grace once he allows himself into his small daughter's game. The instinct to make rivals; the urge to reach out to others. These competing claims - and flawed, elusive love - are the territory of these nineteen rich stories. "Circle Games" probes our darker fantasies of power, control and revenge, in a world not far removed from Grimm's menacing forests, where games are seldom innocent.

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This volume contains 24 short stories of small-town life in Pembrokeshire.

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This autobiographical novel follows the experiences of a new way of life. It charts a woman's challenging, long struggle for independence and creative recognition against a background of growing up in the 1960s, Liverpool, art college, marriage, supporting a painter husband and children.

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Ausra Kaziliunaite's poetry has been described as `post-avant-garde'; she is unafraid to shock readers with her surreal, ugly-beautiful imagery, alternative form, and regular resistance to the rigidity of social norms. In The Moon is a Pill, a collection of the best of Ausra's poetry, translated by Rimas Uzgiris, the reader discovers the extent of the poet's social engagement, mixed with a swirl of psychedelia through an existential lens. As she walks around her city, questioning God, stalked by an abandoned stuffed bird, finding a grubby child in an egg, searching for answers in bus stops and windows, her writing is intimate and personal, yet never reassuring, never fluffy, and often with a quiet nod to the complex political past of her country: who can stop you from writing what you want?/ we must understand that his times were those of censorship/ we now live in a greenhouse like some kind of tomato... from `Freedom'. The Moon is a Pill is part of the Parthian Baltic project which will be launched on time for the London Book Fair 2018. The poetry collections were launched at the Wheatsheaf Parthian Poetry Festival in April 2018.

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The town of Port Talbot has long been seen (quite literally) as synonymous with the steel industry. Yet it also has another claim to fame as the actors' capital of Wales. It has produced a remarkable number of actors since the inter-war years. Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen head the glittering cast but there are many others including early stars such as Ronald Lewis and Ivor Emmanuel, more recent figures like Rob Brydon and Di Botcher as well as a cluster of exciting young actorsstarting to make their names in the West End and on the big and small screen.This book suggests explanations for this phenomenon. Its author is a historical biographer who hails from Port Talbot and has done extensive research including numerous interviews. It explores the provision of educational and cultural facilities for young people over the years and demonstrates a commitment to drama that is deeply embedded in the town's history.It tells in some depth the stories of the super-stars but in a novel way, focusing on how they emerged and on those who nurtured their talent, presenting the actors as part of a tradition that was set in motion even before Richard Burton began to make his mark. It surveys the careers of fifty actors from Port Talbot and it considers what its most famous stars have put back into their community, culminating in the spectacular three-day event of Easter 2011 when Michael Sheen resurrected Port Talbot's pride and hopes through the immersive theatrical experience of The Passion.Written at a time of mixed fortunes for actors when funding for training is threatened yet opportunities for theatre and film work are expanding within Wales, this book puts centre-stage a town, its actors and those who guide them and so offers a new kind of cultural history. Such an approach also raises wider questions about the importance of the arts and of drama in particular to the wellbeing of communities.

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Carwyn James treated rugby football as if it was an art form and aesthetics part of the coaching manual. This son of a miner, from Cefneithin in the Gwendraeth Valley, was a cultivated literary scholar, an accomplished linguist, a teacher, and a would-be patriot politician, who also won two caps for Wales. He was the first man to coach any British Lions side to overseas victory, and still the only one to beat the All Blacks in a series in New Zealand. That was in 1971, and it was followed in 1972 by the triumph of his beloved Llanelli against the touring All Blacks at Stradey Park. These were the high-water marks of a life of complexity and contradiction. His subsequent and successful career as broadcaster and journalist and then a return to the game as a coach in Italy never quite settled his restless nature. After his sudden death, alone in an Amsterdam hotel, his close friend, the Pontypridd-born writer, Alun Richards set out through what he called "A Personal Memoir" to reflect on the enigma that had been Carwyn.The result, a masterpiece of sports writing, is a reflection on the connected yet divergent cultural forces which had shaped both the rugby coach and the author; a dazzling sidestep of an essay in both social and personal interpretation.

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The book is the story of an Anglo Indian community in 1960s Calcutta coming to terms with India taking its first few faltering steps towards democracy. Joan is a single parent whose son's accidental discovery of the body of a young woman, gets her embroiled in the sinister activities of a maoist faction. The movement is bent on bringing a violent revolution to overturn the unfairness of caste, class, religion and privilege. The book evokes the rich multicultural but confused five hundred year heritage of the Anglo Indian community who feel abandoned by the British and unsure of their fellow Indians. You smell the sumptuous cuisine, feel the emergence of popular culture, recoil at the racism, despair at the bureaucracy and are aroused by the sexual tensions. Although the characters in the book are purely fictional, the background is based on real historical, national and world events of the day; the Naxalbari uprisings, President's rule and the rise of democratic Marxism in India. The writing is in the genre of a popular political thriller. The author, an Anglo-Indian, is intimately familiar with the period and is keen to give this almost extinct, post-Raj community and authentic voice. The book will appeal to those interested in stories of South Asia, political events of the 1960s, the cross-over of English and Indian. It is the author's intention to include a list of recipes and a glossary of the less familiar Anglo Indian words.

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In 1976, Niall's family emigrated to Australia, as part of the GBP10 Pom scheme. He lived there for 3 years, moving from Brisbane to Perth in a souped-up station wagon. 30 years later, he returned to retrace his steps. This is his memoir.

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'Vivid yet dream-like, wise and intimate, A Rope of Vines reveals in spare, poetic language a world of fishermen and nuns, and villagers driven wild in a white-hot wilderness. Chamberlain is unsentimental yet passionate about the harsh, raw beauty of the island and the solace of sea and wind. Mesmerising and wonderful - a classic to be read and re-read.' Jennifer Barclay A beautiful and personal account of Brenda Chamberlain's life on the Greek island of Hydra in the early 1960s. Sights, sounds, colours, sea and harbour, mountain and monastery, her neighbours and friends are unforgettably brought to life; as are the emotions and warring desires within her. Both in the intensity and force of the writing and the eloquent island drawings, A Rope of Vines has become a modern classic.

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A small Welsh valley community come together to form a carnival marching band in Gwyn Thomas' farcical exploration of the social, economic and political turbulence abound in twentieth century Wales.

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Myfanwy Haycock (1913-1963) mapped out a career as one of Wales's most talented female poets during the mid-twentieth century and was dubbed as 'Gwent's second voice' at the age of nineteen. A skilled illustrator, journalist and broadcaster, Haycock explored the world around her through impressionistic poetry and often outspoken articles. However, in the years since her death, Haycock's poetic landscape has largely been lost. These poems of nature and love, dreams and mourning, transport the reader from the roaming South Wales valleys to the trampled grass of Kensington and back again.

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A collection of short stories, some set against the background of the author's life as a coalminer in the Neath valley and a soldier in Burma during World War 2, dealing with relationships within families and coal-mining colleagues.Together with one personal essay about the fellow miner and writer B. L. Coombes.

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Whatever happened to Rick Astley? She imagined that he was happily married with children. A record producer, perhaps? That was the usual way with singers, wasn't it? From Bryony Rheam, the award-winning author of All Come to Dust and This September Sun, comes a collection of sixteen short stories shining a spotlight on life in Zimbabwe over the last twenty years. The daily routines and the greater fate of ordinary Zimbabweans are represented with a deft, compassionate touch and flashes of humour. From the potholed side streets of Bulawayo to lush, blooming gardens, traversing down- at-heel bars and faded drawing rooms, the stories in Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? ring with hope and poignancy, and pay tribute to the resilience of the human spirit.

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Gwyn Thomas was born, the last of twelve children, into a Rhondda mining family in 1913. After a childhood marked by the strikes of the 1920s, he went off to study Spanish at Oxford University and in Madrid, where he met the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and witnessed the turmoil which would lead to the Spanish Civil War. On his return, amidst the economic mire of the 1930s and his own burgeoning teaching career in Barry in the 1940s, he picked up his pen and began to write. For more than forty years, until his death in 1981, as novelist, screenwriter, master of the short story, and prizewinning playwright, Gwyn Thomas delivered compelling and comedic portraits of his world of South Wales. His creative genius earned enduring fame on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the European Cold War divide. As a provocative and insightful broadcaster, he embraced the possibilities of radio and television, whilst leaving his hosts and guests alike in fits of knowing laughter. This landmark biography, enriched with unrivalled access to private papers and international archives, tells the remarkable story of one of modern Wales's greatest literary voices.

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Jeffrey Weeks has been called 'the 'most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s'. Yet behind the titles and acclaim lies the story of a hugely fascinating, inspirational life - one both immersed in love and blighted by pain and loss. Growing up in a tight-knit mining community in the post-war Rhondda Valleys, Weeks knew from a young age that he was different. However, grappling with his burgeoning gayness amid this hotbed of sexual conservatism and traditional gender divisions, his initial explorations into this uniqueness led to little more than isolation and shame. Finding salvation in his studies, university brought with it a life-defining opportunity to thrive within the radical culture of late sixties and seventies London. He soon found himself at the forefront of the new gay liberation movement, and his work as its pioneering historian would spark a long career as a researcher and writer on sexuality, with widespread national and international recognition.

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Moon jellyfish live a life adrift, relying on the current to take them where they need to go. They are the ultimate survivors and one of the most successful organisms of animal life. So how do they thrive in the open ocean when they can barely swim? Rooted in her island home, Ness Owen's second collection explores what it is to subsist with whatever the tides bring in poems that journey from family to politics, womanhood and language. In the ebb and flow of an ever-changing world, starlings fall from the sky, votes are cast, a village is drowned, a petrified forest is revealed and messages wash up in seaworn bottles on the shoreline, waiting for answers that will not come.

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BERLIN, 1932 Intelligent, artistic and precocious, fourteen-year-old Sophie Riedesel dreams of nothing more than becoming an actress and spending time with her beloved Jewish neighbour, Isaac Zarco. But when her father and boyfriend become Nazi collaborators and Hitler’s meteoric rise to power gathers momentum, she is forced to lead a double life to protect those closest to her. Invited by Isaac into the Ring, a secret circle of underground activists working against the government, Sophie soon learns the ways of espionage and subterfuge. But when a series of sterilisations, murders and disappearances threatens to destroy the group, Sophie must fight to expose the traitor in their midst and save all that she loves about Germany – whatever the price. Thrilling, suspenseful and evocative, The Seventh Gate is at once a love story, a tale of fierce heroism and a horrifying study of the Nazis’ war against the disabled.

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