Search results for ""Parthian Books""

This is a short-story collection (15 stories), with varied settings, voices and appeal to age-groups, although the strongest readership probably the biggest one for fiction: women 35-60. Its settings are mainly in a neglected corner of Wales: the north-east looking towards Liverpool, plus one story set in Liverpool and one on the north American frontier. A few bring in historical themes and one is set in colonial America. The major theme is power balance at the point that one party takes control: the narrative usually favours men over women. Class conflict is there too but understated. Also nature resisting our attempts to control it, and fatherhood. The whole collection has a rural and small-town feel, reflecting the reality of lives of probably the majority living here and certainly the majority of fiction-readers. It is gentle but certainly not soft: it is sophisticated and perceptive. Sex is quite raunchy in places. Imagery is particularly powerful and is used in a way similar to Jo Mazelis but possibly with more depth. Her control of how much information to include and its timing is excellent. Animals are very present, and represent nature, sensuality and their function at times of bestowing power, e.g. for teenage girls and older single women. Small workplace settings and politics are very strong and extremely representative of contemporary Wales - small businesses, run-down industrial estates etc.

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Isambard Kingdom Brunel reincarnated! A 9-12 year old novel which will enthuse young readers about physics and engineering, challenge gender stereotypes - and is an exciting mystery at the same time! Ideas and facts referred to in the novel relate to key concepts in Key Stage 2 science - Materials, Forces and Motion. It also features a dedicated website, with Key Stage 2 teacher resources, linked to educational, Brunel-related and social networking sites.

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It's the end of an intensely hot summer in Vancouver, and Razor's complex and misunderstood best friend Chris has just driven a stolen police car through a road block and over a cliff to his death. Fireball takes us back to the start of that relentless summer, and unravels the events leading to Chris's death.

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A talent for razor-sharp, satirical observation - Nigel Jenkins Susie Wild's debut collection is a quirky mix in which tales of the fantastic and the everyday are told with inimitable style and flair. The deranged cravings of a mum-to-be lead to the accidental poisoning of her co-worker in 'Pica'. Rob holidays in his bathroom and dreams about his underage love interest in 'Aquatic Life'. 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.

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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 has an inexplicable magic that metamorphoses the exotic into the familiar and vice versa, creating a sense of mild disorientation and unreality that makes you begin to see the world in a different way.

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An autobiographical account of the writers return from the War in Burma to the poverty of the Welsh Coalfields.

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Meandering ,walking without necessarily a plan to arrive, to take in the scene, to explore, to experience. This is what this book is about. It's an attempt at a sideways glance at the cultural activity bubbling under the surface, deliberately choosing five very different artists, whose vital off-centre work benefits from being produced away from the pressure of the dominant metropolitan culture. This variety gives a sense of the rich fluctuations, the oddity and creativity that exist at every level of a Welsh culture in the midst of change. The artists, the writers and editor have collaborated to produce a "performance on paper." Artists Featured Writers; Eddie Ladd Sarah Broughton; Megan Lloyd Maria Donovan; Daniel Morden Jeff Teare; Peter Bodenham Jeni Williams; Neale Howells Rachel Trezise

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Enter the wild and weird world of Tom Fourgs Ten stories of the unexpected - destined to become a classic cult collection New fiction on the road from odd to oddball Includes the hit Osim Bin Laden is Hiding in My Liver "Thomas Fourgs lives by a pond which is home to his unruly parrot frogs. His parrot frogs started getting chopsy when he tossed the first of his corkscrews into their home, the pond. The second corkscrew followed it in a short while later. The third, Thomas' favourite, was hurled into the shrubbery bordering the pond. If his corkscrews weren't handy he'd be less likely to persist with his constant drunkenness (so he hoped). However, by the time the fifth corkscrew hit the water the parrot frogs had become surly, loutish and loudmouthed. This recently intensified when Thomas, in despair, tipped three-quarters of a bottle of brandy over the lily pads. Now the parrot frogs may occasionally be seen staggering in and about the pond, yelling and belching, annoying every fish and insect, creeping and crawling on their amphibian knees, while the author sits cross-legged by the pond, listening to his parrot frogs and contemplating the essence of Spookfish."

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This is a collection of three plays widely performed around Wales.

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"Cardiff Cut" takes a scenic and disenchanted tour of the Welsh capital. Witty, obscene, defiant... an aimlessly anarchic Joycean monologue... steeped in the city of Cardiff...

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A first English translation of 30 Welsh short stories featuring work by many of the leading young writers working in the Welsh language. Contributors include Aled Islwyn, Aled Lewis Evans, John Emyr, Meleri Roberts, Meg Elis, Angharad Price, Manon Rhys and Sioned Puw Rowlands.

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Despite talk of bulls, bears and stock-market crashes, the depression meant little to young brothers Alun and Arthur as they carved their initials into the sycamore tree below Hope Mountain; read Mark Twain and longed to see the great ships that would bring their father home. Eagerly they follow the progress of their father, famous Welsh tenor Jabez Trevor, as he tours North America season after season, the Welsh Imperial Singers packing concert halls coast to coast and their dad sending home postcards, letters and presents from Chicago, Winnipeg, New York - Eight-year-old Arthur hated to read and write, sang like a songbird and wished only for a real leather case football like Dixie Dean. The future was wide open, but tragically for Arthur it never came any closer than the makeshift football pitch on the flat field at Pen-y-Wern farm. Now, eighty years on, his brother Alun recalls those early days with a joyful immediacy in this haunting, music-filled memoir of a time long gone, but still glowing with life.

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Presents a compilation of short stories from fourteen of best Basque writers. This title provides an insight into modern Basque society and literature.

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Dr Emma Short offers a fresh perspective with a simple evidence-based guide to leading a healthier, happier and calmer life. It has a holistic approach to wellbeing, exploring areas as diverse as exercise, nutrition, the impact of the digital and natural environment, sleep, mindset and not taking on too much.

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Two sisters, two nuclear power stations, one child caught in the middle... When Helen, a self-taught prepper and single mother, leaves her young son Jack with her sister for a few days so she can visit Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone, they both know the situation will be tense. Helen opposes plans for a new power station on the coast of Ynys Mon that will take over the family's farmland, and Jennifer works for the nuclear industry and welcomes the plans for the good of the economy. But blood is thicker than heavy water, and both want to reconnect somehow, with Jack perhaps the key to a new understanding of one another. Yet while Helen's is forced to face up to childhood traumas, and her worst fears regarding nuclear disaster, during a trip that sees her caught up in political violence and trapped in Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone during the 2014 Euromaidan revolution,, Jennifer too must discover that even the smallest decision can have catastrophic and long-lasting effects, both within the nuclear industry, and within the home. And Jack isn't like other five-year olds...as they will both discover with devastating consequences.

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In this clear and absorbing memoir John Sam Jones writes of a life lived on the edge. It is story of journeys and realisation, of acceptance and joy. From a boyhood on the coast of Wales to a traumatic period studying at Aberystwyth, to a scholarship at Berkley in California as the AIDS epidemic began to take hold before returning to Liverpool and north Wales to work in community engagement and sexual health. A journey of becoming a writer and chronicler of his experiences with award-winning books and the desire to become a campaigner for LGBT rights in Wales. The adventure of running a guest house in Barmouth where he eventually became Mayor with his husband, a German academic, who he had married after a long partnership. Three weeks after the European Referendum they put the business on the market and moved to Germany. John is still on that journey.

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Visual culture has long been a vital component in the creation and dissemination of this prevalent national brand. The Art of Music describes the visualisation of Welsh music and musicians both in the context of the evolution of the self-image of the Welsh people, and of its influence on outside perceptions of Welshness.

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In this beautifully written memoir Dai Smith engages and entertains with a personal life and times with the characteristic verve of a writer who has illuminated the modern history of the people of South Wales.

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Nigel Jenkins's body of work is remarkable not just for the range of its forms and occasions, but for the variety of its literary, cultural and political commitments. He campaigned for Welsh devolution and international solidarity with the same sense of purpose as he campaigned against nuclear power, militarism and racism. A politically- and culturally committed poet he was unafraid to be satirical, or epic, or polemical, or to be simply and frankly angry. This book contains love poems and poems of desire, lyric poems and public poems for public spaces, occasional poems that transcend their occasions, merciless satires, and poems that borrow epic voices, whether of bravado or lament, and retool them for today's challenges. There are poems written in the spirit of high-intellectual play and urgent poems about environmental degradation, militarism, nuclear folly, imperialism and capitalism. There is beauty and precision, outrage and indignation, savage wit and deep empathy. The book also contains a number of Jenkins's translations from the Welsh - a reflection of his commitment to the bilingualism and biculturalism of his country, and to the idea of a community of poets. A sense of history underpins Nigel Jenkins's writing, but it is the present that propels it. In that sense, his poetry and prose are part of a single, albeit various, oeuvre. They are the work of a writer who believed that poetry has a duty to engage with the world as it is, while holding out the imaginative possibilities of what it can be.

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Ranging from flash fiction to novelette, these stories are in turn chilling, playful, and melancholy. The bonds of family and of community, both in their fracturing and their healing states, the uneasy relationship between living in the present and yearning for the past, are themes that thread their way through Figurehead. Every tale is rich with landscapes haunted by loss and longing. In this debut collection of stories Carly Holmes peers into every corner of the strange fiction genre: from rural gothic through to traditional ghost stories and the uncanny. Mothers turn into trees when the sun goes down; Russian Dolls mourn their missing sisters in rotting houses; men offer sacrifices to the monsters who embody their inner wildness; and murderous demons protect young girls' virginity.

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Neoliberalism has firmly taken hold in Wales. The 'clear red water' is darkening. The wounds of poverty, inequality, and disengagement, far from being healed, have worsened. Child poverty has reached epidemic levels: the worst in the UK. Educational attainment remains stubbornly low, particularly in deprived communities. Prison population rates are among the highest in Europe. Unemployment remains stubbornly high. House prices are rising, with the private rented sector lining the pockets of an ever-increasing number of private landlords. Minority groups are consistently marginalised. All this is not to mention the devastatingly disproportionate impact of the coronavirus pandemic on working class communities. The Welsh Way interrogates neoliberalism's grasp on Welsh life. It challenges the lazy claims about the 'successes' of devolution, fabricated by Welsh politicians and regurgitated within a tepid, attenuated public sphere. These wide-ranging essays examine the manifold ways in which neoliberalism now permeates all areas of Welsh culture, politics and society. They also look to a wider world, to the global trends and tendencies that have given shape to Welsh life today. Together, they encourage us to imagine, and demand, another Welsh future.

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Raymond Williams came from Wales, and was brought up in a working-class family. This fact of place and class has to be considered as the start point for a thread which runs through his life and his work. In Raymond Williams: From Wales to the World this reality is considered as his life and work are traced out across borders, to people and places he could yet bring understanding and engagement. Throughout the book, Williams’ writing, whether theoretical, historical, critical or as fiction has been treated as a single whole, recognising that his ideas were interwoven as a literary and intellectual re-engagement with Wales over several decades. In this collection of essays edited by Stephen Woodhams, Raymond Williams: From Wales to the World serves to further engage and extend his ideas of class and society.

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In February 2000, the writer Richard Zimler met a mysterious dancer at an Australian literary festival, only to witness her tragic suicide the next day. This shocking act was to trigger an investigation into her past that would alter the course of his life forever. His search initially leads him to the tranquillity and tolerance of 1950s Israel, where he learns of the powerful sisterhood forged between two girls – one Palestinian, one Israeli. But as Zimler is drawn deeper into their story, he uncovers illusion, deceit and – most shocking of all – a connection to the most horrifying atrocity of the twenty-first century. At once a memoir and a thriller, The Search for Sana sees the internationally bestselling author of the Sephardic Cycle create an unflinching exploration of lifelong friendship, loyalty, cruelty and dispossession.

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Part of a family's heritage is the tales they leave behind, but what happens if you don't have the voice to tell them? Known locally as the Herring Man, Samuel Evans was a fisherman and sailor. He travelled across the seas, sketching down his experiences and leaving his adventure stories as a legacy. His grandson Gwyn is the only living relative left to tell his tales, but he spends his days in silent isolation, fixing damaged fishing nets with the net-needle Samuel carved from a walrus tusk. When a lonely young boy becomes intrigued with his boat and offers to help fix it, they form a bond that gives him hope he'll be able to speak again. As Gwyn starts talking about the past he begins to leave a legacy of his own. A riddle for the young boy to solve. The Herring Man is a modern-day fable, beautifully illustrated by the author, about dealing with grief and searching for hope.

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After his Jewish family fled the Catholic Inquisition in Portugal, Tiago Zarco lives a tranquil existence in colonial India, enjoying secret sojourns with his sister into the heady festivities of the local Hindu culture while evading the ruling Portuguese authorities. But as he comes of age in sixteenth-century Goa, Ti struggles to keep the far-reaching influence of the Inquisition from destroying his family and pulling him apart from the Hindu girl he loves. And when an act of betrayal sees his father imprisoned, he is forced to hunt down the traitor and make an unimaginable choice, triggering a harrowing journey that will show him the depths of human depravity and the poisonous salvation of revenge. At once passionate, furious and hopeful, Guardian of the Dawn is both a saga of horrifying religious persecution and a riveting, tender multicultural love story.

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The history of Wales as a destination and confection of English Romantic writers is well-known, but this book reverses the process, turning a Welsh gaze on the rest of the world. This shift is timely: the severing of Britain from the European Union asks questions of Wales about its relationship to its own past, to the British state, to Europe and beyond, while the present political, public health and environmental crises mean that travel writing can and should never again be the comfortably escapist genre that it was. Our modern anxieties over identity are registered here in writing that questions in a personal, visceral way the meaning of belonging and homecoming, and reflects a search for stability and solace as much as a desire for adventure. Here are lyrical stories refracted through kaleidoscopes of family and world history, alongside accounts of forced displacement and the tenacious love that exists between people and places. Yet these pieces also show the enduring value and joy of travel itself. As Eluned Gramich expresses it ‘It’s one of the pleasures of travel to submit yourself to other people, let yourself be guided and taught’. Taken together, the stories of An Open Door extend Jan Morris’ legacy into a turbulent present and even more uncertain future. Whether seen from Llŷn or the Somali desert, we still take turns to look out at the same stars, and it might be this recognition, above all, that encourages us to hold the door open for as long as we can.

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Two sisters, two nuclear power stations, one child caught in the middle... When Helen, a self-taught prepper and single mother, leaves her young son Jack with her sister for a few days so she can visit Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone, they both know the situation will be tense. Helen opposes plans for a new power station on the coast of Anglesey that will take over the family's farmland, and Jennifer works for the nuclear industry and welcomes the plans for the good of the economy. But blood is thicker than heavy water, and both want to reconnect somehow, with Jack perhaps the key to a new understanding of one another. Yet while Helen's is forced to face up to childhood traumas, and her worst fears regarding nuclear disaster, during a trip that sees her caught up in political violence and trapped in Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone, Jennifer too must discover that even the smallest decision can have catastrophic and long- lasting effects, both within the nuclear industry, and within the home. And Jack isn't like other five-year olds... as they will both discover with devastating consequences.

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Edited and Translated by Alexandra Buchler. A book of poems by Katerina Rudcenkova selected from her four poetry books by the editor / translator Alexandra Buchler who will also write an introduction.

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A dystopian page-turner about the coming of age of a young hero, which won the 2017 EU Prize for Literature. A fishing village at the end of the world. A lake that is drying up and, ominously, pushing out its banks. The men have vodka, the women troubles, the children eczema to scratch at. Born into this unforgiving environment, Nami, a young boy, embarks on a journey with nothing but a bundle of nerves, a coat that was once his grandfather's and the vague idea of searching for his mother, who disappeared from his life at a young age. To uncover the greatest mystery of his life, he must sail across and walk around the lake and finally dive to its bottom.

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These are hymns and elegies; protest songs and battle cries as Jones speaks to and for the disaffected: 'We are the tapestry / The crackling cracks of modernity / Dislocated desperations stitched together / By the disparate verses of our skin / I write therefore we exist / We exist therefore i write / And from this page this scream.' In this new anniversary edition some of the poems - like his popular, ever-evolving 'the guerilla tapestry' - have been reworked for 2021, taking in the contemporary concerns of Brexit, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, Yes Cymru, food banks, asylum seekers and zero hour workers. 28 new poems turn their gaze to the personal, covering grief and loss, broken trust and marriage, betrayal and forgiveness, haunted by ghosts of both the living and the dead. An inventory of scars where love once lived. fuse / fracture also includes a selection of poems from his other publications over the past two decades: Darkness is Where the Stars Are (Cinnamon Press, 2008), The Aspirations of Poverty (Red Poets Press, 2017) and My Bright Shadow (Rough Trade Books, 2020) as well as some of his lyrics from James Dean Bradfield's recent album Even in Exile (BMG Music Publishing, 2020

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Riverwise, a volume of slow river prose centred around Afon Teifi, is a book of wanderings and wonderings, witnessings and enchantments, rememberings and endings. Weaving memoir, poetry and keen observation into its meandering course, it shifts across time and space to reflect the beauty of hidden, fluvial places, and to meditate on the strangeness of being human. Above all, though, this book stands as a hymn to those fragments of riparian wilderness which on our maps appear as ever- shrinking horns of green amid a white, gridded landscape of human dominance. Riverwise is a clarion call to learn to love and protect the natural world and its waterways.

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John Harrison’s Forgotten Footprints is the untold story of the sailors, sealers and eccentrics who discovered the last continent: Antarctica. A thrilling record of lost triumph and tragedy, a saga of adventure and ambition against all odds, and a compelling insight into extraordinary personalities and the times that shaped them, Forgotten Footprints captures the fascination of this most extreme, mysterious and beautiful of environments in John Harrison’s characteristically vivid and affecting prose.

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RARELY HAS THE POWER OF CINEMA BEEN FELT BY SO MANY, IN SUCH OPPOSING WAYS... "Love Actually dulls the critical senses, making those susceptible to its hallucinogenic powers think they've seen a funny, warm-hearted, romantic film about the many complex manifestations of love. Colourful Narcotics. A perfect description of a bafflingly popular film." By any reasonable measurement, Love Actually is a bad movie. There are plenty of bad movies out there, but what gets under Gary Raymond's skin here is that it seems to have tricked so many people into thinking it's a good movie. In this hilarious, scene-by-scene analysis of the Christmas monolith that is Love Actually, Gary Raymond takes us through a suffocating quagmire of badly drawn characters, nonsensical plotlines, and open bigotry, to a climax of ill-conceived schmaltz. How Love Actually Ruined Christmas (or Colourful Narcotics) is the definitive case against a terrible movie.

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We all have our favourite demons. A desperate Romeo circles the bushes below Juliet's balcony, hoping for a glimpse of her bare body, 'nipples stiffening on powdered ribs'. Adamant of his own sanity, Hamlet chatters away to his oldest friend - the squat skull grinning in his palm. Andromache screams for her only child, 'spiralling like sycamore' from the walls of Troy, her husband brutally dragged to death in the dirt that rises around her. All the while, weaved throughout this collection, the narrator is haunted by her biggest demon of all: the gargantuan Small. Told with a rawness and honesty that sears, the secretive nature of living with an eating disorder is yanked out into the open and given the voice that only ever hisses darkly inside the skull. Through relationship breakdowns, bath-times, the cacophonous dazzle of Delhi and the fug of hospital waiting rooms, Small is always, there slyly riding on the shoulders of a woman running for miles to get away - yet forever haunted by hunger.

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These sharp, ironic and compelling stories are perfect hard gems of observation about the truths of everyday life: kindness and friendship balance precariously with obsession and desire.

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In a lonely house deep in the Black Mountains of south Wales, a man spends insomniac nights absorbed in the ancient texts left him by his mysterious aunt. When a blue tent appears in the field at the end of his garden, his solitary life is turned inside out. But who owns the tent? And when the tent's occupants emerge, whose story are they telling? As his life unravels, the man begins to question whether he is the orchestrator or the victim of his own experiences. Are the stories that guide or steer his life - any life - real, or merely the echo of other, possible lives?

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"The Book of Katerina is a gleefully sardonic novel about illness and family, and how we can never quite cure ourselves of either." - GLEN JAMES BROWN Award-winning and prolific author of novels, plays, novellas, short story collections and translations. A popular stage adaptation of the novel, directed by Yorgos Nanouris, won critical acclaim and was presented to UK audiences in 2016. 'My name is Katerina, and I died by a route dark and lonely, for there was too much in me I could bear no longer.' In this acclaimed Greek novel, Auguste Corteau imagines his own mother's inner life, observing with wit and earthy humour the saga of her extended family's ups and downs in the city of Thessaloniki over three generations. From the poverty of the early years through to affluence and aspirations of grandeur, Katerina drags her husband and son into the chaos of her life: sicknesses are hidden, siblings fight for love and attention while feckless husbands and unwanted children are riven through the family story.

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Jess has lived peaceably in Shrewsbury with her husband Jacob for many years. He is solid, dependable, beautiful to her. She is contented to be his wife, to look after his elderly mother, aunt and cousin, to be a pillar of their family and community. Then, suddenly, everything changes. Now Jess must question the entire basis on which she has lived so many years of her life. Must discover whether the identity she has created has really been so valuable to herself and to those around her, and whether there is a different – angry, passionate, fulfillable – Jess waiting to get out.

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From the very beginnings of Wales, its people have defined themselves against their large neighbour. Wales: England's Colony? shows, that relationship has not only defined what it has meant to be Welsh, it has also been central to making and defining Wales as a nation.

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Debut novel from Rachel Trezise, winner of the Orange Futures Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. The story of a brutal childhood in the Welsh Valleys. Rebecca is trying to grow up fast but the whole world’s against her. She falls in love, gets drunk and takes drugs. There are things she needs to forget. But when writing and books take hold of her life she starts to come up from the bottom.

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“There is no short-story writer who has quite the same gift of infectious vitality, whose scenes and characters seem to come so spontaneously alive” Times Literary SupplementRhys Davies achieved an international reputation as a writer of skill and originality. He wrote for the best magazines of 1930s through to the New Yorker in the 1950s, maintaining a prolific output of both stories and novels.In this Library of Wales edition, with a foreword by Tomos Owen, the essence of his work is revealed with a new selection of dark, witty and finely crafted stories.

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Winner of the Writers' Trust of Canada Journey Prize Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, Burrard Inlet is the body of water that divides Vancouver's North Shore from the rest of the Lower Mainland. In this collection of award-winning stories, Tyler Keevil uses that rugged landscape as a backdrop for characters who are struggling against the elements, each other, and themselves.A search-and-rescue volunteer looks for a missing snowboarder on Christmas Eve; two brothers retreat to the woods to shoot a film in memory of their dead friend; a reclusive forestry worker picks up a hitcher on his way down Mount Seymour; a young man finds a temporary haven on the ice barge where he works. Written in a lean, muscular style, these are stories awash in blood and brine, and steeped in images of freedom and confinement. Within that narrative framework, Burrard Inlet becomes more than a geographical location: it is a liminal space, a boundary and a barrier, a threshold to be crossed.

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At the age of fifty, towards the end of the First World War, W. H. Davies decided that he must marry. Spurning London society and the literary circles where he had been lionised since the publication of his Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, he set about looking for the right partner on the streets of London. Young Emma is a moving and revealing memoir told with disarming honesty and humour. Davies records his life with three women: from his affair with Bella, the wife of a Sergeant Major, to his year-long liaison with the gentle Louise, to the turbulent brushes with a society woman who fears for her own life at his hands. He finally meets Emma, then pregnant, at a bus-stop on the Edgware Road. This is the story of their love affair.

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This rich biography tells the remarkable tale of Margaret Haig Thomas who became the Second Viscountess Rhondda. She was a Welsh suffragette, held important posts during the First World War and survived the sinking of the Lusitania. A leading British industrialist, she was also instrumental in securing a seat for women in the House of Lords. Closely associated with figures such as Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain and George Bernard Shaw, she founded and edited the weekly paper Time and Tide, which dazzled British society with its cutting-edge perspectives. It championed progressive views on women's rights in the 1920s, became a leading literary space for women and men from the thirties onwards and a respected political commentator on national and international affairs. Drawing upon a rich array of sources, many previously unused, Angela V. John explores both the public achievements and the fascinating private world of one of the movers and shakers of British society in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Up ahead, Helen saw the police line harden into a barricade of bodies and shields. Resin batons thudded on Perspex shields; slow, thuggish, brutal. Goosebumps studded her arms and legs. Her pace slowed to the truncheons' beat. Mary halted a yard from the riot shields, raised her megaphone. 'We are women from Ystrad an' from all over Wales,' she said. 'We are here to make peaceful protest. Here in solidarity with the men.' The drumming quickened. Trouble is brewing in Ystrad. It is time to defend jobs, the pits and a way of life that has formed both the life of valley and the nation. The union is squaring up to the Coal Board, the government, the country. Gwyn Pritchard, overman at Blackthorn colliery, believes that the way to save his pit is to keep the mine open and production high. His men disagree and when an old collier dies on Gwyn's shift, the men's simmering resentment spills over into open defiance. But Gwyn faces a challenge at home too. His daughter Helen is in love with a fiery young collier, Scrapper Jones. In March 1984, when miners across the country begin the long strike, Scrapper throws himself into the struggle and Helen joins the women, preparing food for the soup kitchen and standing with the men on the picket line. Helen and Gwyn must decide which side they are on as the year-long dispute drives the Pritchard family apart and the Jones family to ruin. What matters most: to be right, to be loved or to belong?

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The Library of Wales' Story anthologies feature the very best of Welsh short fiction, written amid the political, social and economic turbulence of twentieth century Wales. More than eighty outstanding works from the classics of Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies, Arthur Machen and Gwyn Thomas to the almost forgotten brilliance of Margiad Evans and Dilys Rowe and then forward to the prize-winning work of Emyr Humphreys, Rachel Trezise and Leonora Brito, colouring and engaging in the life of a changed country. Story II depicts a Wales facing-up to a dramatically changed culture and society in a world where the old certainties of class and money, love and war, of living and surviving do not hold. The writers explore the spirit of a country while the ground keeps shifting beneath them. In this selection Dai Smith has crafted an anthology that gives a unique insight into the life of a country: identity; language; class; sex are all are explored intensely in this kaleidoscope of the best of the last fifty years of Welsh short fiction.

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