Search results for ""Parthian Books""

With a foreword by Phillip Pullman, Make Room for the Jesteris a haunting journey from the edge of childhood into a threatening adult world. Lew Morgan and Gladstone Williams are two friends trying to make sense of their lives over a long hot summer in the north Wales seaside town of Porthmawr. It will be a summer that changes everything. When the charming but drunk Ashton Vaughan returns home to Porthmawr the primeval swamp of respectability he triggers a chain reaction of ruin, disillusion and death which keeps the whole town bubbling for most of the summer. There's fraud, farce, drama, drunkenness, temperance, hysteria and tragedy. This Welsh take on 'The Catcher in the Rye' is a remarkable and welcome rediscovery.

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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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Tai and the Troll are mates. Tai lives in Tremorfa and the Troll lives at the bottom of Mrs Griffiths' garden. The Troll likes fishing, apples and his old car which only starts when Tai kicks the tyres. The Troll has to visit his Aunt Senni who lives under a bridge in Brecon and he's asked Tai to come with him on a day trip. The Troll promises to take Tai to a farmer's market in Brecon. Tai thinks he'll buy something at the market.

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"Jampot Smith" is story of a group of friends as they edge towards adulthood in the sunshine and shadow of Llandudno during the years of the Second World War. It is a time which will shape their lives against a war which will define it. For Bernard, the eponoymous Jampot Smith, Kathy, Epsom and Dewi, it is all held in an exquisite balance of emotion and restraint that promises both love and danger. It is a time which will shape their lives against a war which will define it.

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Amy Evans retained all her life the squat nose of her childhood, stubbed on to her face like a plasticine afterthought, a chin too long for any practical purpose, and eyes so close together that it seemed the sole function of the bridge of her nose was too keep them apart. For comfort she would go down to the beach, where the breeze from the sea blew into her face her share of the beauty to which her brother had so liberally helped himself. The gulls would wait for her to leave, no matter how long she stayed, for they were real gentlemen - the only gentlemen she was ever to meet in her life. Now in her late fifties, Amy faces a struggle on two fronts. Loneliness looms the larger as the chance of finding love grows more remote. Survival depends on the outcome of her search for a love object, and "I Sent a Letter to My Love", set in Porthcawl on the coast of South Wales, tells the moving and unsentimental story of Amy's bold play for happiness, and her dangerous success. The richly comic gifts, the wit and inventiveness that distinguished all Bernice Rubens' work are reinforced in this novel by a maturity and depth of compassion for her characters.

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The Withered Root recounts the troubled life of Reuben Daniels, reared in a south Wales industrial valley, in the bosom of the Nonconformist culture. Therein lies his downfall and that of his people, for The Withered Rootis as thoroughly opposed to Welsh Nonconformity as My People(Caradoc Evans), though for different reasons. Revivalist passions constitute nothing but a perverse outlet for an all too human sexuality which chapel culture has otherwise repressed. Nonconformity has withered the root of natural sexual well-being in the Welsh, and then feeds off the twisted fruits.

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This is a beautifully illustrated children's book. 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 will appeal to any little boy with a pocket full of shells, pebbles and elastic bands.

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By turns impassioned, elegiac and tongue-in-cheek, "Whiteout" confronts the reader with the world's uncertainties and disorder. This is a co-authored volume, a feature that chimes with the wider project of playing with voice and perspective, of achieving a form of whiteout.

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Robert Mitchum - aka 'Mr Bad Taste', 'Trouble Himself', 'The Man with the Immoral Face', 'Daddy Bad' - was the original Hollywood bad-boy and one of the greatest screen actors of the twentieth century. But his pre-fame life is cloaked in mystery, the truth hidden within conflicting tales of time spent as a Depression-era hobo, prizefighter, escaped felon - and secret poet. Writer and broadcaster Lloyd Robson trailed the Eastern Seaboard in search of Mitchum, his poetry, America, a surrogate father, and how to be a man. "Oh Dad!" is the result - a boozy, drug-fuelled attempt to define masculinity in the modern age and to match the standards set by the ultimate man and the personification of Film Noir, Robert Mitchum.

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Welcome to a world where you reputation, clothes and attitude are everything. Chris and his year eleven mates trade in cut-price sweets, cadged fags and favours for Graham who has a police scanner in his living room for company. Chris' plans to meet Keely, the girl of his dreams, are put on hold when his mate Zeb gets beaten up and wants revenge. Snowman is on the brink of something big but the death of his Gran is leaving something missing inside. Kish regrets badly what he did and isn't the slightest bit surprised when the police knock at his door...Wake up to your own reality and read "Playing Mercy", a black but never bleak comedy about trainers, trading and family pride.

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Home To An Empty House tells in Alun Richards' incisive style the story of a marriage that has long since lost its sparkle. Walter, the wisecracking paranoiac and Connie, teacher of the 'backward class', are a couple who know a lot about sex but little about each other.

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A year out of the game for a fight gone wrong, Hector Bebb, a boxer from Cymmer, south Wales, is ready to make a comeback, confident that he's got himself under control. Those around him aren't so sure, and their fears are justified as, second time round, Hector's savagery takes a terrible toll, and he has to go on the run. So Long, Hector Bebb, which originally appeared in 1970, recounts in Ron Berry's sparse and uncompromising style the compelling story of the tragic-heroic Hector, a story set in the brutal world of boxing and the disintegration of a community.

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A novel that bridges the market for 14+ & youth with urban adult literary fiction. Endorsed by Niall Griffiths. Affectionate, authentic and hilarious insight into a family governed by brand-name clothes and an older brother with a hard-man reputation to hold onto. Black comedy about trainers, trading, first- and last-chance romance and family pride. Fast-tracking, blackly funny but never bleak look at the world of Chris and Year Eleven mates, Zeb, Kish and Snowman, who trade in cut-price sweets; cadged fags and favours for Graham, who has a police-scanner in his living room for company. Welcome to Britain's top Chav Town, where if you want to go legit to get your clothes, you go to Stolen from Ivor. "Frank's real name is Sukraj and business has really picked up since he started paying Graham one hundred pounds per week for security. He doesn't put a guard on the door and he hasn't fitted any new cameras but Graham's security has definitely worked."

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"Inside Out" is written by Lesley Ross. While at the height of his career, through his involvement with an obsessive fan, Ivor Novello became involved in a wartime petrol scam, resulting in his imprisonment at Wormwood Scrubs. "Inside Out" contrasts the glamorous backstage world of the West End Star with the stark reality of the prison cell. "Sex and Power at the Beau Rivage" is written by Lewis Davies. An invitation: 'Would you care to come here and be my guest at this small and inexpensive hotel for a few days? Bandol is on the Marseilles side of Toulon. My wife and I would both be pleased if you come.' And with the letter, Rhys Davies caught the train to Bandol to meet DH Lawrence and a place in literary history.

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A road book about travel and the lure of migration. A drive along Route 66 from Oklahoma through New Mexico and Arizona to the promised land of California. A country obsessed with change and itself, fragmenting into pieces as the drift of manifest prosperity stalls on the coast.

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A novel about love, friendship - and delivering papers.

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Continuing the Parthian New Welsh Short Fiction series, this work is an anthology of contemporary Welsh writing with 55 short stories from the best of new short fiction. Writers include Leonora Britto, Sian Preece, Anna Hinds, Alun Richards, Meic Stephens, John Sam Jones and Lloyd Rees.

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Six writers, three from Việt Nam and three from Wales come together in the Room/Ystafell/Phòng to discuss their queer identities and how it has been shaped by the world around them. Featuring discussion transcripts, poetry, photography, collages and prose.

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FINALIST FOR THE 72ND NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS – BOOK CLUB CATEGORY ONE OF THE SUNDAY TIMES' BEST HISTORICAL FICTION BOOKS OF 2022 ‘Zimler is an honest, powerful writer’ The Guardian 'A memorable portrait of the search for meaning in the shadow of the Shoah.' – The Sunday Times From the acclaimed author of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon and The Warsaw Anagrams comes an unforgettable, deeply moving ode to solidarity, heroism and the kind of love capable of overcoming humanity's greatest horror. Maybe none of us is ever aware of our true significance. Benjamin Zarco and his cousin Shelly are the only two members of their family to survive the Holocaust. In the decades since, each man has learned, in his own unique way, to carry the burden of having outlived all the others, while ever wondering why he was spared. Saved by a kindly piano teacher who hid him as a child, Benni suppresses the past entirely and becomes obsessed with studying kabbalah in search of the 'Incandescent Threads' - nearly invisible fibres that he believes link everything in the universe across space and time. But his mystical beliefs are tested when the birth of his son brings the ghosts of the past to his doorstep. Meanwhile, Shelly - devastatingly handsome, charming and exuberantly bisexual - comes to believe that pleasures of the flesh are his only escape, and takes every opportunity to indulge his desires. That is, until he begins a relationship with a profoundly traumatised Canadian soldier and artist who helped to liberate Bergen-Belsen - and might just be connected to one of the cousins' departed kin. Across six non-linear mosaic pieces, we move from a Poland decimated by World War II to modern-day New York and Boston, hearing friends and relatives of Benni and Shelly tell of the deep influence of the beloved cousins on their lives. For within these intimate testimonies may lie the key to why they were saved and the unique bond that unites them.

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Late in the 1960s, before Bell was born, her father and mother visited Aberaeron, a small fishing town on the west coast of Wales. Here, her father heard a voice - which he knew to be God - directing him to minister to the Welsh. Six months after she was born in the early 1970s, they moved to Aberaeron where he took up his first curateship. Over the next eighteen years they would move to various parishes within a forty mile radius: first to Llangeler a predominantly Welsh-speaking parish in the Teifi valley, then back to Aberaeron where Bell's father became vicar, and then to a larger and more Evangelical church in Aberystwyth. This unique memoir in verse offers a series of snapshots about religion and sexuality. In verse because it's how Bell remembers: snapshots in words strung along a line, which somehow constitute a life. Snapshots of another time from now, but from a time which tells us about how Bell got here. Not the whole story, but her story. Of an English family on a mission from God, of signs and wonders in the Welsh countryside, of difference, and of faith and its loss.

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When 'Hymns and Arias' rang out at Cardiff Arms Park some fifty years ago, those great Welsh anthems 'Calon Lan' and 'Cwm Rhondda' had found a companion and the valleys of south Wales had produced a new folk hero. Max Boyce's work, with over five decades of creativity, captures the spirit and the story of the people of Wales. It also has a warmth and charm that has made his words and music resonate with a worldwide audience. From his early days touring the folk clubs and small concert halls of his native south Wales to sell-out shows at some of the world's most iconic venues, including the Albert Hall, the London Palladium and the opera houses of Sydney and Durban, Max has become an original and treasured performer whose songs and stories have become part of folk culture. His albums, including the No. 1 album We All Had Doctors' Papers and the iconic Live at Treorchy, have sold in their millions and earned him several gold discs. His greatest influence has always been the valleys of Wales, with their inherent warmth and humour, their sadness and passion, and he has the remarkable ability to heighten, to an art form, the 'hwyl' that attends his nation's national game: rugby union. Compiling - in some instances for the first time in print - the very best songs, poems and stories from across his celebrated career, Max: Hymns & Arias is the definitive selected work of a major cultural figure who, through his inimitable humour, uniquely Welsh pathos and masterful wordcraft, has defined a nation and its people for more than half a century.

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At the dawn of the nineteenth century, John Stewart Zarco lives out an inquisitive, naive childhood in his idyllic Porto community. But societal prejudices against his family’s Jewish faith shatter his innocence and even come to threaten his life. Following the tragic death of his dearest friend, it is only his unlikely bond with Midnight, an African healer and freed slave, that restores a sense of safety. But this fragile, fleeting peace is destroyed when Napoleon’s armies invade Portugal and John suffers another devastating loss – one rooted in unspeakable betrayal and authored by those closest to him. The revelation sets John on course for antebellum America, in what might ultimately prove to be a doomed quest for hope amid unspeakable cruelty and sin. Rich in historical detail and mysticism, Hunting Midnight is Richard Zimler’s mesmerising tale of deception, guilt, forgiveness and devotion, played out against a backdrop of war, slavery and religious oppression.

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Edited by Hanan Issa, Durre Shahwar and OEzgur Uyanik. "I felt the city in my muscles, my saliva. I wanted to be changed. I wanted to be in love." A young woman weaves her experience of abuse into the folklore of her ancestors. A student addresses his OCD by writing letters. A Paralympic medallist reflects upon his journey into a challenging new lifestyle. From language politics to neurodivergence, cultural heritage to sexual identity, from immigration to race, these are insights shared with great care, sincerity, and often humour. Featuring an unbound range of writers; united by their connection to Wales, but reaching freely across continents. This collection is an open invitation. It is a bringing together of previously untold perspectives: creative essays with no hard lines or prescriptive margins. No normative spotlights, only an open space to speak, and be heard. These are stories told on their own terms.

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Country Dance is a story of passion, jealousy and revenge centred around a young woman torn between the opportunities and dangers of her life who grows up in an isolated rural community on the border between England and Wales. A classic love story where the rural way of life is no idyll, but a savage and exacting battle for survival.

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From the remote forests of northern Ontario to a Neolithic burial chamber on the coast of north Wales, from a frozen lake in the Canadian wilderness to a mysterious Welsh heath, Shattercone takes the reader on a strange, compelling and sometimes heart-breaking journey through the blurry junctures that bind together landscapes and lovers. Including buried elephant bones, explorers gone astray, hidden histories, secret islands, loves found and lost, these subtly linked stories explore the curious and delicate threads that weave together places and people.

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William Henry Davies (1871–1940) was a Welsh poet and writer. He was also a traveller and adventurer, often living on his wits as a tramp and itinerant labourer. After a serious accident while attempting to board a train in eastern Canada while on the way to the Klondike Gold Fields he returned to London and began to write. He would become one of the most popular poets of his time with his work championed by both Edward Thomas and George Bernard Shaw. Famous for his prose memoir The Autobiography of a Super- tramp, he is best-known as a poet for ‘Leisure’, a hymn to living slow and having ‘time to stand and stare’. Saints and Lodgers offers an introduction to the wide range of Davies’s poetry which lies beyond his famous reputation. Here are hymns to the beauty of his native south Wales and to the natural world, poems in praise of lives lived on the margins and on the streets, drinking songs and songs of the sea. More than anything, as Newport poet Jonathan Edwards argues in his compelling introduction, Davies emerges as a poet of people, who never turns away from the suffering or the beauty of the saints and lodgers among whom he lives. Jonathan Edwards’s first collection of poems, My Family and Other Superheroes received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. He lives in Crosskeys, near Newport, and is editor of Poetry Wales.

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In a remote Welsh village by the sea, four friends grow up together. Plain but charismatic Del is the ringleader, unstoppable, supremely confident in her ability to get her own way. Neil, shy and stuttering, and Ricky, full of rage and loneliness, are misfits at school until Del takes them under her wing. Steph is the outsider, but she too is mesmerised by Del's devil-may-care approach to life. They hang around together - mucking about in the woods, searching for treasure on the seashore, doing dares, sharing cigarettes. Then, one terrible day, the gang is broken up for good. Meeting ten years later in the now stagnating village, Neil, Ricky and Steph revisit their childhood haunts and re-live the memories that have cast a shadow over each of their lives. Del is, by turns, the beating heart at the centre of all their stories and a gaping absence. Set against the backdrop of the northern Welsh coast, and told through the voices of Neil, Ricky and Steph - the children left behind - Revenant pieces together their memories of childhoods broken by desertion, absence and death, and uncovers the secrets and betrayals of childhood friendships, with thoughtful, shocking brilliance.

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To Hear the Skylark's Song is a memoir about how Aberfan survived and eventually thrived after the terrible disaster of the 21st of October 1966, when Pantglas school took the full force of thousands of tons of colliery waste and a community lost a generation of children. It is a story about how people held a community together and created a space for each other to thrive. It is also a wonderfully thoughtful and insightful story of what it was like to grow up in a Valley's community in the 70s: a thriving place of people, shops, clubs, chapel concerts, coal mines, interwoven with gossip and stories and, of course, the annual bus trip to Barry Island. Aberfan found a way to carry on, and Huw vividly brings to life how the sense of community provided strength and comfort in the shadow of a lifetime-long grief. A community that continues to innovate and inspire.

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Eric Ngalle thought he was leaving Cameroon for a better life... Instead of arriving in Belgium to study for a degree in economics he ended up in one of the last countries he would have chosen to visit - Russia. Having seen his passport stolen, Eric endured nearly two years battling a hostile environment as an illegal immigrant while struggling with the betrayal that tore his family apart and prompted his exit. This painfully honest and often brutal account of being trapped in a subculture of deceit and crime gives a rare glimpse behind the headlines of a global concern.

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"What you could change and alter could never be finished or complete or dead. This is what I had been told back then, and what I had tried very hard to believe in since."Beside a lake in the northern Canadian wilderness, fifteen year old Zachary Tayler lives a lonely and isolated life with his father. His only neighbours are a leech trapper, an eccentric millionaire, and an expert in snow. But then one summer the enigmatic and shape-shifting Eva Spiller arrives in search of the remains of her parents and together they embark on a strange and disconcerting journey of discovery. Nothing at Sitting Down Lake is quite as it seems. The forest hides ruins and mysteries; the past can never be fully understood. And as Zach and Eva make their way through this haunted landscape, they move ever closer towards an acceptance of what in the end is lost and what can truly be found.

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An incongruous ice-cream van lurches up into the Welsh hills through the hail, pursued by a boy and girl who chase it into their own dark make-believe world, and unfurl in their compelling voices a tale which ultimately breaks out of childhood and echoesacross the years. Pigeon is the tragic, occasionally hilarious and ultimately intense story of a childhood friendship and how it's torn apart, a story of guilt, silence and the loss of innocence, and a story about the kind of love which may survive it all.Mae fan hufen ia yn stryffaglu i fyny'r allt trwy'r cenllysg. Rhed bachgen a merch ar ei hol a'i dilyn i gaddug eu dychymyg. Clywir eu lleisiau cyfareddol yn adrodd stori sy'n chwalu mur plentyndod ac yn atsian ar draws y blynyddoedd.Stori am gyfeillgarwch plant a sut y bygythir y cyfeillgarwch hwnnw yw Pijin. Dyma drasiedi rymus sydd ar adegau'n eithriadol ddoniol. Fel yn y Saesneg gwreiddiol mae'r ddwy iaith yn rhan anhepgor o wead stori am euogrwydd, am golli iaith a cholli diniweidrwydd ac am y math o gariad all oresgyn hyn i gyd.

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When Hernan Cortes met the Mayans, Aztecs and other cultures of the gulf coast of Mexico in 1519, it was the first extended contact between the peoples of continental America and Europe. The Spanish found cities larger and better run than any in Europe, and pyramids greater than Egypt's. The Aztecs believed time was running down and they lived in the final age of the world. Many Spaniards believed Christ's millennium was approaching, and God's revelation of Americas had opened the final act: the conversion of the remote races of the earth. After the Day of Judgement God's experiment with man was over. The laboratory, the physical world, would be destroyed. Both cultures were acting out the last days. Halfway through researching this book John Harrison had a scan which told him he would not live to write it; he was seeing out his own days. The Aztec people were concerned with the transitory nature of worldly things; some of their rulers were revered as much for their philosophical poetry as their conquests. John Harrison follows Cortes's route along the Mexican coast and across country to modern Mexico City, home of the Aztecs.A journey within journeys to the end of time, the book becomes a meditation on time, on mortality and self, from a modern master of travel writing.

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The second of Lewis Jones' two epic industrial novels of the 1930s. Len, son of Big Jim and dynamic political organiser, takes centre stage in Lewis Jones' sequel to Cwmardy. Along his journey, he is influenced by Mary, a teacher, and the Communist Party, which becomes central to his work both underground and in union politics, and to his decision to leave and fight in the Spanish Civil War. We Live paints a graphic portrait of the casual exploitation, tragedy and violence as well as the political hope and humanity of South Wales industrial workers from the 1900s to the 1930s.

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William Henry Davies was born in a pub and learnt early in life to rely on his wits and his fists - and to drink. Around the turn of the century, when he was twenty-two, his restless spirit of adventure led him to set off for America, and he worked around the country taking casual jobs where he could, thieving and begging where he couldn't. His experiences were richly coloured by the bullies, tricksters, and fellow-adventurers he encountered - New Haven Baldy, Wee Shorty, The Indian Kid, and English Harry, to name but a few. He was thrown into prison in Michigan, beaten up in New Orleans, witnessed a lynching in Tennessee, and got drunk pretty well everywhere. A harrowing accident forced him to return to England and the seedy world of doss-houses and down-and-outs like Boozy Bob and Irish Tim. When George Bernard Shaw first read the Autobiography in manuscript, he was stunned by the raw power of its unvarnished narrative. It was his enthusiasm, expressed in the Preface, that ensured the initial success of a book now regarded as a classic.

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From the author of the celebrated Great War memoir

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A story of time slipping, desire just out of reach, like memories lost

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Bill Rees has been living in the south of France for ten years working as an itinerant bookseller in Montpellier. The one thing he misses about England is table tennis. Then he sees an advert to join a club for “experienced players only” and veterans. He starts training immediately, he’s forty and not as fit as he used to be but Bill Rees is returning to the game à la carte. Covering one Sunday tournament in the depths of Languedoc when his team bids to make the National Finals, Bill Rees produces a deeply felt and deeply funny homage to the beautiful game of ping-pong. Rees shows the sport for what it is: painful, exhilarating, tactical, fast (especially when his club mate Alain is at the table), consuming. All of which is revealed from the perspective of a Brit playing in French amateur leagues. Conveyed is the pain of competition, the agony of losing and the joys of victory. The reader is also regaled with a Zen-like insight into the sport. For all those athletes who dream of glory being around the corner and never too late. Contains illustrations by the Monpellier based artist Beachy.

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Marius Burokas' collection for Parthian, Now I Understand, translated and selected by Rimas Uzgiris, reveals the unbreakable connection he feels with Vilnius, as well as the comfort he finds within literature: books are my/ paths/ and garden/my shelter /and clinic.

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Cheval 9 contains a selection of the best work submitted this year to the Terry Hetherington Award, which has become known as one of the most significant awards for young writers in Wales.

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Cheval 7 presents a selection of the writing submitted by the talented young entrants to this year's Terry Hetherington Award, and includes new work by previous winners.Some of these writers are appearing in print for the first time; others have already begun to make their mark on the literary scene.

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A coming of age late tale as a jaded PR man seeks meaning and love in his life and addresses past, present and future along with a misfit cast of mystics, tramps, bar flies and copywriters.

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