Search results for ""parthian books""

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

"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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

Dead birds fall from the sky, an octopus lies stranded on a beach, and a lost shoe becomes a public shrine ... Untethered, Philippa Holloway's first collection of short stories, provides an unflinching glimpse of daily life interrupted by unexpected events.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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...

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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...

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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?

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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...

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

`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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less