Search results for ""Parthian""

Arguably the greatest of all published memoirs of the Great War, Old Soldiers Never Die is Private Frank Richards' classic account of the war from the standpoint of the regular soldier, and a moving tribute to the army that died on the Western Front in 1914.

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The first of Lewis Jones' two epic industrial novels of the 1930s. Big Jim, collier and ex-Boer War soldier, and his partner Sian endure the impact of strikes, riots and war, while their son Len emerges as a sharp thinker and dynamic political organiser. Cwmardy 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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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 and beyond. More than eighty outstanding works from the classics of Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies, Arthur Machen and Gwyn Thomas to the almost forgotten brilliance of work by 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 I depicts a Wales wracked by a driving capitalism, shriven by hypocrisy and soon devastated by two world wars; but still creative, resilient and sometimes laughing uproariously. The writers produced stories to entertain, engage and share in the intimate lives of a distinctive people. In this selection Dai Smith has crafted an anthology that gives a unique insight into the life of a country and the talent of its major writers.

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w a l e s . c o m Widely regarded as one of the most readable, humorous and poignant autobiographies available today. Goodbye, Twentieth Centuryincorporates 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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A classic selection of the best of Stan Barstow's stories covering the last five decades of British life. A group of young tearaways on a night out that begins with horse-play and ends in tragedy; the loneliness of a drunken miner's wife; a war-shocked ex-sailor forced beyond endurance, a widower is brought to grief by a woman outside his real understanding, a factory worker finding his way through the physical world of his marriage - real and involving, Barstow's stories are urgent slices of life, men and women struggling and succeeding to come to terms with The Likes of Us.

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1949: Egypt's struggle against its British occupiers moves towards crisis; Israel declares its statehood, driving out the Arabs; Joe Roberts, an RAF sergeant, his wife Ailsa and daughter, Nia, leave Wales for Egypt. "Into Suez" is a compelling human and political drama, set in the postwar period when Britain, the bankrupt victor of the Second World War, attempted to assert itself as an Imperial power in a world wholly altered. The novel is set in the run-up to the Suez Crisis, a template for future invasions (Iraq and Afghanistan being the most recent). In this moving story, Joe's tragedy is that of an ordinary working man of his generation: he's a lovely, humorous, emotional man in whom the common ration of racism and misogyny becomes a painful sickness. Ailsa, intelligent, curious and craving to explore the realities of the Egypt she enters, meets on the voyage out Mona, a Palestinian woman who excites in her yearning for a world beyond her horizons. When Joe's closest friend is murdered by Egyptian terrorists, their relationship spirals towards tragedy. Through it all, love remains. Looking back in old age, their daughter Nia follows in their wake to sail the Suez Canal with the aged Mona. Nia has been told her father was a war hero: now she will face a more painful truth.

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Harry Price has worked for years as a railway signalman in the Welsh border village of Glynmawr. Now he has had a stroke, and his son, Matthew, a lecturer at Oxford, returns to the close-knit community that he left. As Harry lies in silent pain in his cramped bedroom, Matthew experiences the jarring familiarity of the childhood world which, alienated, he can no longer re-enter. Struggling with the unspoken tensions and losses that returning home has provoked, he recalls what has made him who he is. Upstairs his deeply thoughtful father recalls his own arrival in the village, the relationships between men during the General Strike, and the social and personal changes that followed, and he struggles to articulate all that has been left unsaid. A beautiful and moving portrait of the love between a father and son, and of the strength and resilience of a small community, Border Countryis Raymond Williams' finest novel

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One of the great novel sequences of the British working-class people framed in the valleys and coal-mining villages of south Wales in the early decades of the twentieth century.

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The poems in Natalie Ann Holborow's Little Universe are an exploration of tumultuous human emotions and nature's ever-present rhythms.

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A music scholar makes an unlikely friend in a retired sea captain. In the trenches in WW1 France, a soldier befriends a young Tommy before they both go over the top. A poet uses sumptuous imagery to take us on a journey from summer to autumn.

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Stories in The Missing Woman circle around women who are either literally missing or who are missing some metaphorical piece of themselves. Burns asks questions about balance - safety with adventure - dreams with practicality - grief with joy - and challenges the reader to take a journey, make choices...

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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.

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Dream On is a black comedy, a flashlight noir thriller, a meditation on the lives and stories that connect up the frayed wires in the business of living.

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Tapestry of a Desert Nomad brings together a selection of amateur naturalist and austringer Eric Morrisey's reflections -on flora and fauna, his own roots in the Welsh Valleys, and world events...

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A serial killer is on the loose in a sleepy, Welsh seaside town. The year is 1947 and three young men have recently been demobbed. They share the favours of Lilian Ridetski, who runs more than a high class hair salon in the town. When she and others are found brutally strangled, suspicion falls on all of her customers.

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Disappearances, displacements, separations: Anna Lewis's startling first collection is populated with characters who move through the liminal space between departure and arrival.

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It all begins in a small town in Belgium on the morning of the festival of St. Woelfred. There are dead fish scattered everywhere, blown in by the wind. Are the fish a sign from the saint or a trick played by Contexture, the dance group who once got naked at the Vatican? The lives of six people who live in the town are about to be changed forever

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A collection of short stories and poetry by twelve writers from around the world on the theme 'After Dark'.

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Intends to translate the mystery of Chimera into poetry and short fiction from experienced women writers. From the disgruntled serpent in the Garden of Eden to the reaches of outer space, from the bright lights of Hollywood to the coast of Kenya, this title features contributions that present an intrinsic vision of the writer's imagination.

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Twenty-first century women have it all. We can do what we want, when we want and with whom we want. Can't we? This book is a collection of life stories by women in their 20s to 70s. It is about how we live: our desires, discontents, ambitions and commitments.

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Features poems about settling, building and planting in a country where the author is a stranger. His chosen forms - lyric, ode, sonnet, eclogue, elegy, epithalamium - point to an engagement with British tradition.

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Features poetry of ten poets, each with an American background and an active, creative engagement with Wales. This title deals with the 'matter of Wales' and the 'matter' of being Welsh-American, developed through divergent poetics and perspectives. It features Jon Dressel, Denise Lever, William Greenway, and William Virgil Davies.

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Presents a comic drama, where four international experts converge at a luxurious Cardiff hotel to each bid to save a language on the verge of extinction. As personalities clash and opposites attract, the decision on which language should be saved becomes impossible to make.

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A collection of poetry, prose, visual art, and photography, this volume reflects the Cardiff-born author's unique style and use of language as he deals with themes such as war, hijacking and suicide, and drugs and pop music.

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This volume includes the plays Little Sister, Giant Steps, and Killing Kangaroos."

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Men Alone is a meditative vision from a unique voice that explores the many often confounding permutations of modern masculinity

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When a local common is threatened with development, one poet explores its secrets, discovering extraordinary natural treasures and wonderful people fighting to defend them. Can they save this uncommon common?

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This collection brings together leading voices from female writers, artists, commentators and academics to reflect on how devolution has affected them and altered our political and social landscapes. Here,a series of creative and personal responses explore the true impact of devolution on the lives of women living and working in Wales.

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Set in Zimbabwe during the early 2000s, amidst a backdrop of political turmoil, Fox Bites is a dark coming-of-age horror fantasy about pain, loneliness, and stepping back from the abyss.

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Texts from Gorwelion will be made available as digital contributions to events at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties COP26 in Glasgow, 1-12 November 2021, representing voices from the UK and India in uniting the world to tackle climate change, where the book will also be launched and available to buy. * Produced in collaboration with Sustainable Wales/ Cymru Gynaliadwy Gorwelion follows on from Sustainable Wales' initial project 'Our Square Mile', created to help us imagine the future.

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These sensual stories by prize-winning author John Sam Jones reveal lucid prose and complex lives. Moving through city steam rooms, rugged North Wales mountains and estuaries facing other places. Risky sex, new romance and easy understanding, a mortgage on a semi or keeping a lid on it all for the sake family, status and belief...

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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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Kisses Sweeter Than Wine is an honest and absorbing memoir from a man who has emerged as one of Wales’s major cultural figures. Boyd Clack is a man of many talents: a writer, actor, singer, musician, enthusiast, and with this first book picks apart a challenging upbringing in Tonyrefail, his wanderings to Australia, Amsterdam and London, and his experimentation as a young man with drink and drugs and love. This is Boyd’s story, told with candour and perception and skill that will absorb anyone interested in what it was to be young and Welsh – and are now older and maybe a little wiser. ‘Boyd is a brilliant actor and writer, truly unique, a genius by any definition of the word.’ – Rhys Ifans ‘I love Boyd’s unique take on life.’ – Rob Brydon “Awesome and hilarious... I cannot recommend this moving, truthful, funny and endearing roller coaster of a ride enough.” – Eve Myles

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A man's own story from the Rhondda. Jeffrey Weeks was born in the Rhondda in 1945, of mining stock. As he grew-up he increasingly felt an outsider in the intensely community minded valleys, a feeling intensified as he became aware of his gayness. Escape came through education. He left for London, to university, and to realise his sexuality. From the early 1970s he was actively involved in the new gay liberation movement and became its pioneering historian. This was the beginning of a long career as a researcher and writer on sexuality, with widespread national and international recognition. He has been described as the 'most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s'. His seminal book, Coming Out, a history of LGBT movements and identities since the 19th century, has been in print for forty years. He was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Jubilee Honours in 2012 for his contribution to the social sciences.

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In Windfalls, Wild writes of fruit blown down by the wind, of unexpected and unearned gains which renew the beauty and joy of life. Here flying trampolines disrupt trains, apples carpet gardens, the Balloon Girl rises and the red moon sinks. In a city of ups and downs the Handkerchief Tree rare-blooms, fists and knickers are flung, crestfallen angels consider dates, carnivores go hungry, wedding vows are made and a pandemic honeymoon is cancelled. These are also stories of heroines who fall or jump from pedestals, taking risks in a world that is often dangerous for women, but refusing to settle for the conventional. Wild continues to bring us her refreshingly slant world view, whether unpicking the domestic, the political or the environmental.

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This is his first full biography, describing the early years of the Blaenclydach grocer's son, his abhorrence of chapel culture , his bohemian years in Fitzrovia, his visit to the Lawrences in the south of France, his unremitting work ethic, his patrons, his admiration for the French and Russian writers who were his models, his love-hate relationship with the Rhondda, and above all, the dissembling that went into Print of a Hare's Foot (1969), an autobiographical beginning , which proves to be a most unreliable book from start to finish.

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A Fox in the Yard is a remarkable sequence of poems centred around an enduring and hard-earned sense of place, combined with a deep respect of the natural world, its mysteries and our perception of them.

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`Jaio is undoubtedly a very skillful narrator' - Inigo Roque, Gara *Winner of a PEN Translates Award *Bestselling book in Basque at the Donostia-San Sebastianand Bilbao Book Fairs, winning the Euskadi Plata and Zazpi Kale prizes. *Winner: Seventh Igartza Prize, the Beterriko liburua (an annual distinction which readers award the best book in Basque), Hontza, JUUL, and Iparraguirre. Have you ever had the feeling of not truly knowing your nearest and dearest? The precarious balance in the life of Nerea, a thirty-something journalist, breaks down when her mother, Luisa, is hospitalised with total amnesia. Nerea, who feels guilty for not having recognised the symptoms that afflicted her mother, now finds a person almost unknown to her. Luisa is haunted by memories of a romance from her youth and soon Nerea begins to discover that the two women share much more than they believe.Her Mother's Hands is an examination of the deepest human bonds and a beautiful and moving tribute to life. My Mother's Hands is Jaio's debut novel and remains one of the bestselling books in the Basque literary scene in recent years. The novel has been adapted for the big screen, filmed by Mireia Gabilondo, and presented at the Donostia Zinemaldia, the San Sebastian International Film Festival.

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Hey Bert contains poems that speak intensely of the everyday, of nostalgia, friendship and love, the body, the sacred, all seen through Pastore's unique, eccentric filter of spirit animals, pop-culture, dreams and astrology. In the spirit of John Giorno, Anne Waldman, and Julia Heyward, Pastore's work draws from performance art, confessional poetry, mantra, and folklore to create a voice both fiercely contemporary and somehow out of time.

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Somewhere near the bleak Head of the Valleys there is a housing estate called Texas-2. Here a vibrant cast of characters, related by blood and dislocated by time, hunt, hate and love each other over the course of a dark yet hilarious narrative. Through this landscape wanders Hank Evans, epileptic and visionary, a lost soul in search of final meaning. Leading to Texas-2 is a riveting account of violent lives and human redemption in a Wales seldom so revealed in all its stark, bizarre reality. Aled Smith has created a brilliant and lively world; a world imagined over two brutal days and rooted in a place that may never be seen in quite the same way again.

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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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