Search results for ""parthian books""

Edited and Selected by Meena Upadhyaya and Chris Weedon Narrative editor Kirsten Lavine Foreword by Julie Morgan and Jane Hutt Introduction by Prof Terry Threadgold, previous Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Cardiff University The stories of women from Wales' minority communities are seldom heard. This book comprises the life stories of 40 Black Asian Minority Ethnic women that were finalists/winners for the Ethnic Minority Welsh Women Achievement award (2011-2019). The women featured include some from long-settled, often mixed families and women from various parts of South and East Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Their life experiences are a fundamental part of the history of multi-ethnic Wales. Individual stories testify both to the struggle and to the remarkable contribution that minority women have made to the many sectors of Welsh society.

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Jack Priday, down-at-heel and almost down and out, returns to his hometown towards the end of the 1970s after a decade's absence, just looking for a way to get by. His life becomes entangled with those of old friends Keith, Judith and O, and with the slow death throes of the male-dominated heavy industries that have shaped and defined the region and its people for almost two centuries. As circumstances shift around them, the principals are forced to find some understanding of them and to confront their own secret natures. From multiple viewpoints, Shifts is a slowburning, controlled and intense examination of the relationship between our inner lives, the people around us and the forces of history.

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A Wilder Wales highlights the astonishing transformation of Wales from a poor rural backwater to the crucible of the industrial revolution and offers readers an insight into the ways in which outsiders viewed the land and its people. A fine gift book for discerning travellers and tourists wanting to take words from Wales home. “Even Hannibal himself wou’d have found it impossible to have march’d his army over Snowden” Daniel de Foe, A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain... 1724

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Edited with an introduction by Peter Wakelin. Part of the Modern Wales series. Originally published in 1945, Miner's Day tells of the coalmining life of the thirties in south Wales.

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Edited with an introduction by Daniel Hughes 'A restless shape-shifter from the mysterious Welsh Marches, Heseltine was as elusive in his idiosyncratic writing as in his extraordinary globetrotting life. It is good to have his work briefly pinned down in this groundbreaking collection for closer inspection.' - Professor M.Wynn Thomas Cariad County: a place of anarchy and farce, of the grotesque and the slapstick, of tragedy and violent comedy, where the local hunt is disrupted by a camel-riding hero, where the town hall burns down as the town cheers, a place haunted by grotesque revenants from the First World War. This is the world of Nigel Heseltine's short stories, fantastic fictions which lampoon and lament the slow decline of the once-powerful squires and landowners of mid-Wales, the very Montgomeryshire of which Heseltine (1916-1995) formed a part. Nigel Heseltine is a long-neglected member of Wales's 'Golden Generation' of English-language short story writers which included Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies and Glyn Jones. His stories appeared alongside theirs in major magazines such as English Story and Penguin New Writing in the 1930s and 1940s. This volume re-prints for the first time since their initial publication the stories published in Heseltine's Tales of the Squirearchy (1946), alongside a substantial number of stories never previously collected. Ranging from the starkly surreal to the subtly moving, these tales reveal Nigel Heseltine as a singularly talented writer, the equal of his better-known contemporaries.

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Bound together by blood ties, Martha, Jack and Shanco live on a farm in west Wales where their lives unfold in their eerie half- presence of their dead parents. Glimmers of understanding punctuate their relationship with one another, but unspoken animosity seems to be the most potent ingredient. A lament for the prizes and the price of nurturing a landscape: an antidote for anyone impatient with those who choose to stay in one place.

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The Perseids brought it all out of the past, with a force like a blow that leaves you winded. The night lurched and seemed to swoop suddenly down. The boy still lay on his back, but when I sat up, gasping, I glimpsed the pale disc of his face as he turned to see what had startled me. 'It's all right,' I said, though it wasn't. It is the summer of 1954. Four young men, on a summer vacation buy an old car from a farmer and drive it from the hills of Wales all the way to the mountains of Spain. It is only a few years since the war, Europe is still in ruins. They are innocent and war-scarred, dreamers and realists, men but not much more than boys. They have their whole lives ahead of them. This will be their summer to remember. A beautiful, elegiac rumination on youth, friendship and the dreams that we hold. "A haunting meditation on memory and loss that takes the reader on a summer road trip to a vanished Spain. In this well-crafted, wistful novella, Sam Adams weaves his tapestry from fragments of a remembered friendship in a coming of age tale written with sixty years' bitter hindsight." - Richard Gwyn Sam Adams has created a rare novel in The Road to Zarauz, both timeless and very much of a time and a place, a past of hope and expectation erased in a moment, and what remains when hope is gone.

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When the author is given a small package, containing letters and papers relating to his grandfather's brother, who was killed in Syria during the Second World War, it leads him on an extended personal journey. An exploration of history, imagination and the process of memory, shifting imperceptibly from autobiography to travelogue, from letters and diaries to official records. In his first prose work Lewis reveals a rare and consummate literary talent. Deeply rooted in his Welsh identity, this young writer locates his own and his family's experience within the wider European world in a thoughtful, mature and highly original book.

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It is 1958: Isolde Dahl is a young teacher who goes to work in a British school on the shores of Lake Ploen in north-west Germany. She is returning to a country she fled as a child refugee with her mother, Renate. Her father has disappeared into the chaos of a continent ravaged by war. Isolde has grown up in a Wales both strange and familiar. 1945, Lake Ploen. Michael Quantz is an officer in what is left of a shattered German military command as they stage a last chaotic stand before the Allied armies in the final days of the World War II. Everyone has secrets. Michael wants to survive: his wife and son may still be alive. He will hide, change, become a teacher of music. As Isolde and Michael meet on the shores of a German lake, the choices they have made and the stories they have told will change their lives again.

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This insightful and revealing collection of essays focuses on seven Welsh women who, in a range of imaginative ways, resisted the status quo in Wales, England and beyond during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Written by an acclaimed biographical historian, the essays not only challenge expectations about how women’s lives were lived in the last two centuries, they also explore different ways of approaching biographical writing and understanding, as well as raising issues of gender and nationality. From the pioneer doctor and champion of progressive causes, Frances Hoggan, to the irrepressible twentieth-century novelist Menna Gallie, these women spoke out for what they believed in, and sometimes they paid the price. Although proud of their Welsh identity, they articulated it in a variety of ways, and each spent most of their adult lives outside Wales. They became familiar, and often controversial voices, on the page and platform in London, Oxford, Northern Ireland and internationally. Lady Rhondda and Edith Picton-Turbervill championed women’s equality at the centre of power in Westminster, whilst Myvanwy and Olwen Rhŷs saw education as the key to change. Women’s suffrage played a prominent part in the lives of these women and was especially central to Margaret Wynne Nevinson’s thinking, writing and actions. The intelligence, determination and grit of these women is revealed through their stirring stories. Taken together, the essays critically investigate the challenges, setbacks and hard-won achievements of feisty women who rocked the boat over a period of 150 years.

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With a foreword by Dr. Becky Munford Part novel, part fantasy, part social history. More than anything it tells dark, universal tales about how utterly strange it is to learn to be human. Moving from 1970 to the present day, Deborah Kay Davies relates the history of Grace and Tamar, their volatile childhood, disruptive coming-of-age and dubious maturity. The book is part novel, part fantasy, part social history. More than anything it tells dark, universal tales about how utterly strange it is to learn to become human. Dr. Becky Munford is Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University, where she teaches and researches modern and contemporary women’s writing, spectrality, fashion and dress history (especially trousers). She is the author of Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and European Gothic (2013) and co-author of Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique (2013). She is currently writing a book on women and trousers.

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poems about being sick and being in love. finding out you’ve got a serious illness like multiple sclerosis is a bit like falling in love. you are never quite the same again. when you get your heartbroken, it’s like getting the news that you’re ill. It’s a process of grief and you think your life is over and that you will never move on, but you do. alternatively, when you become ill and when you fall in love, you are just simply fucked.

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Seven Days is a story of adventure and spirituality as father and son travel the "Rue du Bonjour" across the pilgrim route of the high Pyrenees.It is a journey with a writer grappling with some of the questions of modern life, his love for the mountains, his beliefs and aspirations and examples set both by his father and the enigmatic fellow traveller they meet in a remote auberge who comes to symbolise and shadow their sojourn, a man he nicknames Hemingway, although he is neither a writer nor an American.A wonderfully engaging work of travel, discovery, and contemplation by an exciting new voice.

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Iola and Pijin make up stories to test each other, stories of daring and adventure, of bad people and of Gwyn who drives his ice-cream up the hill to their town every week. Gwyn is a dangerous man and Pijin knows it. Iola is not so sure. As they grow up and their friendship grows more complicated, some of their stories fall silent, but some will come true.

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Travel to the revolutionary closing years of 18th century England. Meet Jack Cockshutt, arsonist by trade, returning to rescue his victims and profit from their relief, finding the woman who just might save him. Meet the beauty who castigates her customers with passages from Paine's Rights of Man; the boy who raises the tricolour on the White Tower; the labourer contracted to spend seven years locked up beneath a dilettante's country house. Meet Lappish women. Glimpse the picnic party of the Ottoman ambassador. A stunning new voice emerges with these strange and gemlike stories.

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Flame and Slag is Ron Berry's masterpiece. It is a richly complex novel which uses the fictional sieve of Caib Colliery and the village of Daren to give meaning to the kaleidoscopic history of all the South Wales valleys in the last century. The unspeakable horror of Aberfan in 1966 was the terrible nemesis of that now lost world, and as re-imagined in this remarkable 1968 novel is the cusp time in the intertwined lives of the lovers, Rees Stevens and Ellen Vaughan, and of Ellen's father, John whose journal is the book-within-a book which Rees must discover and interpret if all the fires of living on are not to fall into cold ash.

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