Search results for ""parthian books""

Since the end of WWI, one party has held the momentum of political and social change in South Wales: the Labour Party. Its triumph was never fully guaranteed. It came quickly amidst a torrent of ideas, actions, and war. But the result was a vibrant, effective and long-lasting democracy. The result was Labour Country. In this bold, controversial book, Daryl Leeworthy takes a fresh and provocative look at the struggle through radical political action for social democracy in Wales. The reasons for Labour’s triumph, he argues, lay in radical pragmatism and an ability to harness lofty ideals with meaningful practicality. This was a place of dreamers as well as doers. The world of Arthur Horner and Aneurin Bevan. And yet, as the author shows, this history is now over. Although a trajectory leads from the end of the Miners’ Strike both to the advent of devolution and the circumstances that led to the Brexit vote in 2016, these are exits from Labour Country, not a continuation. Sustained by a powerful synthesis of scholarship and original research, passionate and committed, this book brings the cubist epic of South Wales and its politics to life.

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Head in the Clouds: Memories and Reflections is the long-awaited sequel to Boyd Clack's acclaimed first memoir Kisses Sweeter Than Wine. Made up of 100 Facebook posts, the book blends prose with selected poems to share tales from the stage, from the Welsh valleys and from the founder of The League of Middle Aged Destroyed Men. Boyd examines the merits of snail racing, suggests what to say when meeting an ugly baby, and explores ageing, love, and death. His reflections are based on years of observing the common beauty found in people, animals, and trees all of which form what he calls 'The River of Souls'.

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Over more than a decade, Dylan Moore has written with verve, insight and warm humour about places. Life’s journey takes the author from winding roads in rural Wales via bull runs in the Basque Country to the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Guinea; from smalltown stations in Slovenia to the gates of Auschwitz; from bookshops in Venice and San Francisco to literary festivals on the Keralan coast; from football terraces in Cardiff to street protests in Mexico City. Along the way we meet refugees from Kurdistan and Venezuela, recovering addicts from Bosnia, writers, artists, flamenco dancers, activists, and desert tribesmen singing the songs of Manu Chao. Driving Home Both Ways is part essay collection, part travelogue through life – it offers fresh reflections on the changing nature of the local and the global, epiphanies of tribe and faith, and is underscored always by the enduring allure of elsewhere and the constant pull of home.

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Kelinu waits for a birthday card from the Queen of England. He has a few years to go but he'll wait. His niece thinks he's a fool. He was in the service of the Queen only a year, all those years ago. Times have changed. In these stories people strive to make a place, a living, a life with meaning in a new country or sense in an old one: from zero hour contracts in Bridgend and Munich to scraping a living as a mermaid on the streets of Barcelona. A woman tends a beautiful garden she knows will be taken away from her while another sends her child to a school concert dressed as a dinosaur. A man attends yet one more demonstration while another explains to his daughter where he is really from. In this diverse and fascinating anthology, writers from across Europe embark on a journey of independence and belonging.

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Translated by Jayde WillEeva Park began as the author of mood poems depicting nature, and has said that she mixed feeling and thought in her poetry, while her prose is a mixture of understanding and memory. This original collection, translated by Jayde Will is an exploration of values, real and imagined incorporating the best of Park's work from the last three decades. Freefall is part of the 'Parthian Baltic' project. The project was launched at the Parthian poetry festival at the Wheatsheaf and the London Book Fair 2018 (focus region: Baltics).

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Ethel Ross, the sister in law of Alfred Janes, was the guardian of Dylan Thomas' legacy for decades. Shortly after his death in 1953, She compiled a photo memoir of his haunts in and around Swansea. Ugly, Lovely: Dylan's Swansea and Carmarthenshire of the 1950s in Pictures is a touching collection of Ethel's photos accompanied by quotes from Dylan Thomas' poetry and her own comments. Together they provide an unprecendented portrait of Swansea, Laugharne and Llansteffan in the 1950s, letting the reader see the Carmarthenshire landscape for the first time through the eyes of Wales' most celebrated poet. Ugly, Lovely also contains a rarely seen satirical sketch, 'Lunch at Mussolini's', written by Thomas as a schoolboy. 'This particular sketch he gave to me to put on at the Swansea Little Theatre. In those days I used to write comic sketches for the party held after each show; but it was never produced, probably because I managed in the end to put together something more topical for the society. I still have the script, however.'- Ethel Ross Lunch at Mussolini's offers a vivid and whimsical insight into the early workings of Dylan's mind and a caustic satire of the dictator's life. Patiently preserved by Ethel, the sketch will be published for the first time alongside her photo memoir.

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Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award, the Roland Mathias Award and the Welsh Book of the Year Award, The Shape of a Forest is a powerful survey of life and of human experience that spans centuries and the continents.

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In these slippery stories the truth and the possible weave as unexpected lives, complicated minds and exotic spaces are sketched in with nimble words and quick wit. Ghosts torment from the past; future selves write back; the lost look about, find themselves watched, and are led astray.

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The US President, John F Kennedy, is assassinated as his motorcade hits town, watched by crowds of spectators and the world's media. Watching too from the grassy knoll nearby is a young mother who, in the confusion, lets go of her daughter's hand. When she turns around the little girl has vanished. Fifty years later, when everyone remembers what they were doing at that moment in history, she is still missing. Who will remember her? Local hack Gary Blanchet, inspired by the mother's story, joins forces with former police psychic Lydia Collins to seek answers. Risking ridicule for their controversial theories and with a classroom shooting close to home to deal with, they re-examine the evidence from that day, study footage and look at the official report for details of witnesses in the JFK case. But this time they're not looking for a man in a crowd with a gun; they are looking for little Eleanor Boone. Gone, while no one was watching? Maybe someone was.

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The fifth edition of the "Cheval" anthology presents the 2012 Terry Hetherington Award-winning poetry and prose entries. The Terry Hetherington Award aims to encourage and promote young and emerging writers. The respected former Welsh poet, short story writer and Academi Member Terry Hetherington passed away in 2007. The bursary was first awarded in 2008. A charitable trust, it is funded by the Neath Poets and Pints night, and recently qualified for a Lottery grant. Profits from the sale of the anthology will help to fund the following year's award.

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Kisses Sweeter Than Wine is a brutally honest and completely absorbing literary 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, his experimentation as a young man with drink and drugs and love. This is Boyd's story, told with an honesty 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.

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Four friends. One intensely hot summer that will change their lives forever. When a group of hedonistic teenagers save a woman from drowning they become unlikely local heroes, but their celebrity becomes the focus for first envy, then harassment. Fireball takes us through their last summer together, and one that will come to define their future: a summer of sex, chemical experimentation, shifting loyalties and disillusionment.

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From Rhondda heroes chasing the American dream to rioters staking a claim in their society In the Frame is a powerful alternative history of twentieth-century South Wales, offered from the personal viewpoint of cultural historian Dai Smith. It takes the reader into a territory - a mythical and veritable Dai Country - formed by the influence of writers and painters, boxers and historians, friends and relatives, rioters and correspondents, critics and photographers. As well as the autobiographical overtones of a Tondypandy childhood and distinguished career, In the Frame contains the far wider undertones of a collective biography. Its mosaic pieces together the consciousness of a society which led its inhabitants in search of fame and fortune as well as the daily struggle for rights and recognition without sympathy or sentimentality. An alternative history of twentieth century Wales by TV presenter and the nation's leading cultural historian Dai Smith.

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Winner of the Best First Book Award at Zimbabwe International Book Fair 2010. Ellie is a shy girl growing up in post-Independence Zimbabwe, longing for escape from the confines of small-town life. When she eventually moves to Britain, her wish seems to have come true. But life there is not all she imagined. And when her grandmother Evelyn is brutally murdered, a set of diaries are uncovered - spilling out family secrets and recounting a young Evelyn's passionate and dangerous affair with a powerful married man. In the light of new discoveries, Ellie begins to re-evaluate her relationship with her grandmother, and must face up to some truths about herself in the process. Set against the backdrop of a country in change, Ellie - burdened by the memories and the misunderstandings of the past - must also find a way to move forward in her own romantic endeavors.

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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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"Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays" is an established and thriving journal which is the natural place for young scholars to submit new, cutting-edge research, while it also has the prestige to attract the big names in the field. This volume edited by Katie Gramich has more submissions of a comparative and interdisciplinary nature, as well as more international participation including some startling original research on Raymond Williams and innovative essays on Rhys Davies, Edward Thomas and Glyn Jones. 'Setting a new agenda and a new standard for literary criticism in Wales' - Dafydd Johnston, Professor of Welsh at Swansea University. 'Hearteningly unafraid of courting controversy' - Clare Morgan of Oxford University. 'Fill[ing] a huge gap ...I can't think how we ever did without it' - John Powell Ward, former editor of "Poetry Wales".

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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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An educational resource pack to accompany the titles in the Library of Wales series. This pack has been designed to help teachers introduce classic Welsh writing in English; aimed at students studying English GCSE and A Level.

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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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Vic Brown is a young man on the way up, he's got a job, money, ambitions and a new girlfriend, Ingrid Rothwell. His mate has even got a car - a Triumph TR3. He's never had it so good. But Ingrid wants to get married, it's the only respectable thing to do. She's a step above Vic and he knows it. If they marry they could move in with Ingrid's mother. He could move out from the house he grew up in. A real married couple. The world has begun to close in on Vic. A Kind of Loving is a seminal novel in British working-class fiction. First published in 1960 it has been adapted for stage, television, radio, and was made into an iconic film. A Kind of Loving made Stan Barstow one of the key voices of the 1960s cultural renaissance in British life. With a new afterword by David Collard.

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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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