Search results for ""Parthian""

Winner of the 2013 Beterriko Liburua Award and the 2013 Zazpi Kale Prize, the prize of Bilbao book fair. `But what if we are all fictioneers? What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives? (…) Our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world…’ J.M. COETZEE A writer in her late thirties retreats to Landes in France for a while, fleeing from her own suffering after the break-up of a relationship. Little by little, she finds solace in writing about the losses in her life, about her person, and about indifference and freedom, and in sharing the doubts that arise in her creative process with a `you’ whom she imagines to be on the other side of the paper. The glass eye, a self-referential element of the author-protagonist and metaphor for pain and transcendence, also represents the literary concept of the work, a private notebook where fiction imitates and replaces a fragmented reality. Translated into English by Amaia Gabantxo, arguably the most prestigious Basque-English translator working today.

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One day in winter a military drone on a training flight hurtles out of the sky and smashes into a holiday park. A young mother living in a static caravan is killed instantly. While all the initial reports suggest a tragic accident, Abby Hughes suspects the crash was a deliberate act of sabotage by a homeless man who made maps and hated war. Determined to find the truth, she has to contend with the powerful forces trying to bury it.

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`A sharp, pacy novel that has all the best hallmarks of the literary thriller...’ Patrick Mcguiness Within the dark heart of an abandoned city, on an island once torn by betrayal and war, lies a terrible secret… Francis Benthem is a successful artist; he’s created a new life on an island in the sun. He works all night, painting the dreams of his mysterious Russian benefactor, Illy Prostakov. He writes letters to old friends and students back in cold, far away London. But now Francis Benthem is found dead. The funeral is planned and his old friend from art school arrives to finish what Benthem had started. The painting of dreams on a faraway island. But you can also paint nightmares and Illy has secrets of his own that are not ready for the light. Of promises made and broken, betrayal and murder… The Golden Orphans offers a new twist on the literary thriller.

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From the very first page of this varied and engaging debut collection, Rhys Owain Williams invites his readers to pause. Here is a poet who is working things out, taking time to contemplate what it means to grow older with each passing day. The poems in That Lone Ship are often caught between two places – inhabiting the quiet spaces between childhood and adulthood, lust and love, heartbreak and new beginnings, life and death. An acute observer, Williams writes with a sharp-eyed, questing intelligence. The future has as large a presence in this collection as the past. Restrained and elegantly-crafted, the poems in That Lone Ship resonate beyond the page, finding their footing between the known and the unknown, the said and the unsaid.

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Sebastian has long been haunted by the disappearance of his father, Jack Messenger: celebrated travel writer, potential spy and murder victim, his absent presence and equivocal past continue to cast inescapable shadows over his son, who must also contend with his ageing mother's fragmented memory and his own dereliction of a partner. So who is the stranger that buttonholes Sebastian at an academic conference on the Welsh coast, and reveals lies and transgressions neither outgrown nor comprehended? How does he know Sebastian, and what are his connections to Jack Messenger? Equivocator, in a story that stretches from Egypt to Germany, from Iran's Zagros Mountains to the Gower coastline, is a study of fathers and sons, lovers and betrayers, loss and recovery, and combines dark fable, satire and a love story in its pursuit of the question: can Sebastian find his own salvation, despite the inheritance from his father?

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Port Talbot has an undisputed claim to be called the actors'' capital of Wales, producing a remarkable number of actors since the inter-war years including Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen. This book suggests explanations for this phenomenon while also surveying the careers of 50 actors from Port Talbot and considering what its stars have contributed to the community.

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What does it mean to have a connection with someone? Everyday you see tens and hundreds of faces and overhear countless conversations. Everyday you pass people by - on the street. In the office. In the car. In cafes and bars. Down the corridors of department stores and hotel rooms. But what makes one person a stranger, and another a friend, an accomplice, even a lover? A traveler shuts himself up in his hotel room, with no-one but room service to talk to; a teenager stalks her long-lost father; a journalist interviews a great poet with a dark past; a woman pursues a doomed liaison with an anonymous man she meets once a month at the casino; a bar lady locked in with the regulars at night...These are just some of the tales exploring the mysterious and random side of human relationships. From the winner of the prestigious Robert Walser First Novel Award and Switzerland's Schiller Foundation Writers Prize, Goldfish Memory is the first translation of Monique Schwitter's form-breaking work. With a contemporary style that's cool, quick and funny, this collection is a refreshing new voice, not to be missed.

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Cosmic Latte is a name scientists have assigned to the average colour of the universe - here it is a shade of nail varnish...The territory - forbidden sex, sex as passport, illegal activities, drugs, heavy drinking, smuggling...those who have been displaced...the ambitions that drive desires...forgive. A new collection of eleven dazzling stories of lives lived on either side of boundaries, and on the fringes of society, is teeming with unforgettable characters whose dreams, yearnings and regrets are at once unique and universal, from Dylan Thomas Prize-winner Rachel Trezise. Here, deep tragedy rubs shoulders with sharp comedy as children come of age and adults come to terms.

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Born in her father's coffee house in Change Alley, London, Sarah Battle is raised in a smoke-thick atmosphere of coffee and alcohol. Witnessing and suffering from the destruction of the Gordon Riots in 1780, she longs to escape her surroundings into a better life. Her first attempt is via marriage to a man who's not what she thinks he is. Her second sees her in the new, promising, democratic world of late 1790s Philadelphia where she experiences deep love and warm friendship. Meanwhile, not far from Battle's, lives Joseph Young, a highly talented, depressive engraver who picks up Lucy, a girl he finds collapsed in a doorway. Their fraught life, with its connection to an extreme, revolutionary group, contrasts with the joy of Sarah's brief stay in America. The two stories weave together and eventually merge in a final exhilarating and dangerous journey, during which Sarah's vision of both past and future reveals the direction of a new life. The Flight of Sarah Battle is set in the turbulent last decade of the 18th century in a London where riot constantly rumbles and Bartholomew Fair entertains, and Philadelphia, where new building, hope and a democracy not quite fully.

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In 1983, two University Professors looked slightly bemused as they scanned the shelves of the South Wales Miners' Library. One said to the other, 'Do miners read Dickens?' We seek to answer that question, and a little more besides. This special fortieth anniversary volume chronicles the origins of the Library out of the remnants of the magnificent Workmen's Institute libraries, once described as 'the brains of the Coalfield', and charts its development over time to becoming a unique research and lifelong learning centre.

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Migrants, immigrants, travellers, and holidaymakers feature in Dylan Thomas Prize-winner Rachel Trezise's second collection of short fiction: in eleven dazzling stories of lives lived on either side of boundaries, and on the fringes of society, is teeming with unforgettable characters whose dreams, yearnings and regrets are at once unique and universal. Orthodox Jewish teenager Levi, having been caught fishing pornography from a waste bin in a Brooklyn Park, is sent to reform school in Israel, his simple pious existence threatened when he meets moon-faced nymphomaniac Tzippy, resident of a nearby psychiatric hospital. Lonely seven-year-old third generation Northern Irish- Italian, Majella, finds solace in her collection of Barbie dolls when her father is murdered by terrorists and her mother is floored by grief, learning to deal with the horrors of the world through child's play. East German opera aficionado, Silke, faces a life-changing decision when she wakes to find her American lover, Michael, stranded on the opposite side of an impenetrable but hastily thrown-up wall. Here, deep tragedy rubs shoulders with sharp comedy as children come of age and adults come to terms.

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An elderly farmer dies, following an accident on a remote mid-Wales smallholding, leaving the kingdom he had ruled over so fiercely to his two daughters, Lucy and Cadi. As they prepare for the funeral, the novel charts the courses whereby each sister came to be what she now is; Lucy, the one that got away, fleeing the farm secretly and without warning, never to see the old man again, and Cadi, who promptly gave up her job as a teacher in Manchester to take Lucy's place in her father's lonely, narrow world, beginning a pattern of guilt, self-submission, self-reliance, and occluded rage that would last until his death. A haunting, elegiac evocation of hill-farm life, from its very first line A Kingdom is preoccupied with the connotations surrounding the word 'rooted' and with what it means, for good and ill, to be tied to such a place.

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Water, water, everywhere. Or is it? "The Sound of Thirst" explains the urgency of taking water and waste water seriously in an age where good management and political will are chronically scarce. This book present a moral, economic and sustainable case for financing the many trillions of pounds of work needed worldwide in the coming decades to ensure safe water for all - and a cleaner earth. Leaving behind the old lie that water should be free, "The Sound of Thirst" explores how the human right to water is about empowering people to make reasoned choices about their destiny - and how mismanagement and political expediency have contributed to global inequality. Written by a leading water consultant, "The Sound of Thirst" will appeal to anybody looking to uncover the realities of our common future which lie behind the rhetoric.

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The Water-castle is a journal of love, romance and discord in 1950s Germany as a Welsh artist and poet, Elizabeth Greatorex, travels with her French husband to meet her former lover Klaus, a German count. Elizabeth maps a frost- and snow-bound landscape of desire against the hardening borders of a newly divided Germany. In her revealing diary, she records her struggle to bridge the distance between Wales and Germany, East and West while considering her own mythologised past and real diminished present. Brenda Chamberlain's writing pits creative idealism, emotional hunger and sexual longing against the brutal displacements of post-war Europe.

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A new edition of House of America, playwright Ed Thomas's obliquely structured account of a dysfunctional Welsh Valleys family living on the edge of an open-cast mine whose loss of self-worth and sanity is fatally accelerated by the imported dreams they fill their lives and bury their past with.

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This book may be considered as the second stage in the crucial campaign to raise the profile of Welsh writing in English both within Wales and in the wider world. The first stage was the foundation of the Library of Wales series, which was strongly advocated by all academics in the field of Welsh writing in English. Now that these largely forgotten works have been republished, it is possible for us to use them for teaching purposes in universities. We are left with the problem that critical material on these texts is scarce and, in some cases, non-existent. There is a demonstrable need on the part of undergraduate and postgraduate students for a critical book focusing specifically on a range of Library of Wales titles which will both introduce them to the field of twentieth-century Welsh fiction in English and demonstrate the varying critical approaches that can be used to analyse these texts. The book is a multi-authored work with its origins in the Association for Welsh Writing in English, which will include essays by both established leaders in the field, such as Professors Knight, Thomas, and Brown, and new, cutting-edge research by young scholars at the outset of their academic careers, such as Morse, Wainwright, and Hendon.

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"The Caves of Alienation" is a story of unfolding revelation about the difficult, fascinating character of Caradock. His family made their fortune from the industry of Wales, but his cosseted childhood in the Welsh valleys only fueled his desire to leave, and his efforts to escape are explored through the multi-voiced narrative. Then there are his crucial first encounters with sex, his literary success in London and his final withdrawal to Wales. But it is the riveting manner of the telling which gives "The Caves of Alienation" its virtuosity. It is told from a variety of viewpoints, some conflicting, all interrelated. Friends and enemies, literary rivals, lovers, critics, the 'official biography', even television and radio documentaries jostle each other in the narrative with their own (sometimes feigning) fragments of truth. Caradock's own novels and essays play a vital part in the story. All this makes for an exhilarating, kaleidoscopic read, funny and profound by turns, yet never flinching in its portrayal of Caradock and his deepest preoccupations. The phrase tour de force is a tired one, but it has seldom been more justified than in the case of this exceptional novel.

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The village of Tanygraig on the Welsh-English border is the setting for this passionate novel of love and its consequences. Beti, the beautiful and wilful daughter of a pub landlord, is pursued by two men: Llew, her aggressive, red-haired cousin, and Evan, the dreamy miller and would-be poet. She has to make a choice but it's not her future alone that depends on her decision. She and Tanygraig are positioned precariously on borders of class, nation, language, and changing times. In this enduring novel by Geraint Goodwin, first published in 1936, Wales is associated with tradition and stability, England connotes modernity and movement. Beti is conscious of living at a temporal border: "The old way of things was ending; she had come at the end of one age and the beginning of another. Wales would be the last to go - but it was going..."

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Starling knows a chemist called Roper, who knows a painter called Jourbert, who knows a man in Mexico who works for the government. Mescal has always had its routes into the world. There has been a new shipment, but not quite what anyone expected. This is a new drug. It opens the doors of perception for a man like Roper hiding away in his north London laboratory. He can make people work for him, turn his friends into fools or murderers, if only he could control his own mind...Anita is such a beautiful woman but she could never love a man like Roper...Power and pleasure always corrupt...

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"A Rope of Vines Journal from a Greek Island" is a beautiful and personal account of the time spent by Brenda Chamberlain on the Greek Island of Ydra in the early 1960's. Sea and harbour, mountain and monastery, her neighbours and friends are unforgettably pictured; these were the reality outside herself while within there was a conflict of emotion and warring desires. Joy and woe are woven fine in this record: the delight of a multitude of fresh experiences thronging to the senses, the suffering from which she emerges with new understanding of herself and human existence. Both in the intensity and force of the writing and the eloquent island drawings, "A Rope of Vines Journal from a Greek Island" is a distinguished achievement.

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Using a rich array of material from Williams' hitherto unused personal papers, diaries, letters, unpublished novels and stories, notebooks, work drafts and fragments, Dai Smith takes us through the formative years on the Welsh Border as the son of a railway signalman and his wife, on to Cambridge in 1939 and War service in Normandy, to show in telling detail how the making of "Culture and Society" (1958) and the writing of his novel, "Border Country" (1960) was all of a piece in the conceptual breakthrough he strove to make in the 1950s. The meaning of Raymond Williams is revealed in his making. This biography places its central figure within a deeply researched social and cultural history so that we can see again, as Raymond Williams insisted we should that Culture is "a whole way of life".

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Set in the bohemian under-belly of Barcelona, this novel combines an urban thriller and a gothic historical drama focusing on Catharism, a 13th century heretical sect.

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Launch on World Book Day 2005, selected by Welsh Books Council as Book of the Month March 2005 New stories from experienced and award winning Welsh writers and an opportunity to read new talent This collection forms a bridge between the tail end of the urban genre in popular fiction and a confidence in twenty-first century Welsh writing in English Some of the short fiction in this anthology is set in the urban centres of Wales. Other stories take the threads of styles of writing, urban and contemporary, weave then into the strings of themes that tie together the diversity and intertwining cultures strewn across the landscape of a modern Wales. Award winning authors mixed with debut writers, this is Parthian's most eclectic collection of short Welsh Fiction since the ground-breaking Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe. It is the biggest anthology of all new fiction to come out of Wales. Nineteen stories featuring Niall Griffiths (Welsh Book of the Year Winner), Leonora Britto (Rhys Davies award Winner), Tristan Hughes, Jo Mazelis (Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer's Award), Lloyd Robson, Glenda Beagan and Rachel Trezise (Orange Futures Winner) among others.

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The Merthyr Trilogy brings together three important works of distinctive drama from one of Wales's leading contemporary writers. Bull, Rock and Nut "a most remarkable piece of theatre...layered with meanings, violence and power." The Guardian In Sunshine and In Shadow "Shot through with intensity and honesty, a powerful play." The Western Mail The Redemption Song " A stark uncompromising tragedy." The South Wales Echo

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'An ode to grief and sibling love from a great new voice' Kit de Waal, author of My Name Is Leon 'A beautifully layered story… Poignant, astute and hopeful' Sharon Duggal, author of Should We Fall Behind 'Highly compelling… a fascinating exploration of political hope, friendship, difficulty, infatuation, and unrequited desire' Naomi Booth, author of Exit Management ‘This captivating novel is a reminder that love, coupled with courage, just might conquer all.’ Heidi James, author of The Sound Mirror 'Deeply, profoundly human… leaves the reader heartsore in exactly the right ways' Will Burns, author of The Paper Lantern ‘An ambitious state-of-the-nation debut’ Helen Cullen, author of The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually ‘A beautifully observed portrayal of the spirit of Brighton’ Allie Rogers, author of Little Gold 'Unforgettable and stirring… An important debut' Alice Ash, author of Paradise Block 'Really compelling... It’s at once psychologically thrilling and fast-paced with a meditative heart' Anna Vaught, author of Saving Lucia 'It will resonate with a large, bruised section of the population still fighting for a better future' Glen James Brown, author of Ironopolis A fiercely hopeful novel about family, sexuality, grief and how we as individuals can rediscover our political agency in the face of continued uncertainty. Brighton, 2016. Laurie wears the scar given to her by a policeman’s baton as a mark of pride among her circle of bright young activists. Her conscionable but sensitive brother George should be a part of that circle, until the appearance of enigmatic Spanish migrant Antonio threatens to divert him from his sister’s world of marches and moral accountability. As the clouds gather over Brighton and the EU referendum accelerates both Laurie’s political zeal and Antonio’s ambiguous desires, George is faced with the fact that their city of parties and protests is suddenly a place where the possibility of saving the world – as well as the people around him – is in jeopardy of being lost forever. At once a letter of support to everyone disillusioned by British politics, and a deeply perceptive snapshot of modern relationships, A Bad Decade for Good People is a captivating state-of-the-nation tale that begs the question: when it feels like the world is falling apart, how do you keep those you love from doing the same?

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This collection with parallel texts in Italian and English gives the English-reading audience a sense of the great variety of the present poetic scene in Italy with a selection of twenty-one of the most representative contemporary poets. Contemporary Italian poetry offers an extraordinary array of styles, voices, approaches, ways of looking at the world and ways of representing it. This anthology tries to capture the multiplicity of these voices with its selection of the most representative poets from different backgrounds: academics, working-class writers, editors, journalists, performers, travellers and professional translators. The poets who appear are: Antonella Anedda, Franco Buffoni, Dome Bulfaro, Maria Grazia Calandrone, Chandra Livia Candiani, Milo De Angelis, Matteo Fantuzzi, Fabio Franzin, Marco Giovenale, Mariangela Gualtieri, Andrea Inglese, Rosaria Lo Russo, Valerio Magrelli, Guido Mazzoni, Umberto Piersanti, Laura Pugno Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Ida Travi, Luigi Trucillo, Patrizia Valduga, Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto and Lello Voce.

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Cardiff Writers’ Circle was formed in 1947 and is joined here by other local writinggroups, all lending their imaginations to a wide variety of styles, genres, and formats. You may laugh. You may cry. You may gasp at the sheer beauty contained within these pages. But above all, you will be holding a snapshot of the fantastic talent that exists today in Cardiff, city of the dragon.

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This book focuses on the stories of Syrians who have found refuge in Wales, based on their own oral testimonies. They were recorded as part of a research project undertaken by Cardiff University and Amgueddfa Cymru- National Museum Wales. Moving away from their home country has resulted in a break from their past lives and a rupture from their histories and cultures. One of the aims of the project was to help them connect their past to their present and give them a sense of belonging. Their histories are now part of Welsh history.

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LONGLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2024 Chloe enters the local talent show, seeking fame, fortune and a ticket out of town. Meanwhile, her mother, Angie, wakes up hungover on the morning of her fourth wedding day. William ponders his impending autism diagnosis through the lenses of Descartes and Hollywood heartthrob Clive Owen. Jimmy, the hot-headed proprietor of a firework shop, rages at the emergence of a rival store, as his ex-wife considers the existential ramifications of her uncanny resemblance to TV cleaning personality Kim Woodburn. Local Fires sees debut writer Joshua Jones turn his acute focus to his birthplace of Llanelli, South Wales. Sardonic and melancholic, joyful and grieving, these multifaceted stories may be set in a small town, but they have reach far beyond their locality. From the inertia of living in an ex-industrial working-class area, to gender, sexuality, toxic masculinity and neurodivergence, Jones has crafted a collection versatile in theme and observation, as the misadventures of the town's inhabitants threaten to spill over into an incendiary finale. In this stunning series of interconnected tales, fires both literal and metaphorical, local and all-encompassing, blaze together to herald the emergence of a singular new Welsh literary voice.

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Pearl and Bone explores the complexities of the first year in the life of a pandemic mother, with the stories of other mothers interwoven amongst the author's intimate moments, from pregnancy to childbirth and beyond. These poems showcase the lost voices of women through history - in the throes of labour, Mary paces the stable; in a dim Soho studio, Christine Keeler poses for the infamous Lewis Morley photographs; while above us, the moon laments the number of feet that have stormed her surface. Beautiful, emotional and richly imagistic, Mari Ellis Dunning presents mothers in many forms: those experienced, chosen, unwitting, and presumed, asking us to consider the true nuances of motherhood - delicate as pearl, durable as bone.

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Contemporary Italian poetry offers an extraordinary array of styles, voices, approaches, ways of looking at the world and ways of representing it. This anthology tries to capture the multiplicity of these voices with its selection of the most representative poets from different backgrounds: academics, working-class writers, editors, journalists, performers, travellers and professional translators. The reader will discover a diverse poetry dealing with the topical concerns of identity, sex, politics, migration and race.

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Lewis has written a script. Eighty pages in ten days. Hardly slept... He taps the bag on his shoulder with a delicate fingertip like it’s a hot kettle. Cliff is then given ten minutes on the problem with Lewis’s printer. Then the history of problems with his printer. Then problems with printers more generally... Robert Clifford is in Cairo to present his latest film for a festival prize. It has taken seven gruelling years of his life to make and is definitely NOT a film about his mother. But his moment in the spotlight is not quite as he scripted. There are rumours the jury could be influenced. Nobody can lay their hands on a copy of the film. And even his girlfriend thinks it’s about his mother. Cliff’s producer has not turned up but sent his nephew Lewis Proudfoot instead. Lewis has a script of his own to sell and is determined that everyone should hear about it. Then a meeting is arranged with a group of the festival organiser’s friends, who may or may not be revolutionaries... Angels of Cairo is a fast-moving, acerbic comedy told over a single day but capturing a lifetime of angst and self-doubt.

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Sarah's not abnormal or ugly, just a little bit fat, and she's got cerebral palsy. "No way was it rape or even molestation... she's fourteen, not a child. I'm not a paedophile." Gemma's mother had shagged Tom Jones. Nobody knew who her father was, least of all her mother. Spiderman doesn't want to inflict his petty-thief persona on self contained Caitlin, but he finds himself getting off at her stop. When chickens that belong to 'Chelle's grand-dad start to peck each other, sounding like death warming up, she wrings one of their necks and ends up doing worse. Johnny Mental was sitting on his porch wearing sunglasses, drinking lager, his teeth orange and ugly. Someone was painting their front door a few yards away, with a portable radio playing soul music; Diana Ross or some shit. A big burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier came around the corner, real slow like an old man on a hill. Eleven wry and defiant stories on the power and beautiful transience of youth.

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World Book Day National Winner A bitterly intelligent and gruesomely funny journey through the worlds of work, sex and rugby. Lewis Davies ruthlessly dissects a passion on a four day odyssey through the pubs, bedrooms and building sites of a smouldering town. A Welsh homage to Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and A Kind of Loving, it is a novel that has become one of the modern classics of contemporary Welsh life.

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For five months John Harrison journeys through this secret country, walking alone into remote villages where he is the first gringo the inhabitants have ever seen, and where life continues as if Columbus had never sailed. He lives at over 10,000 feet for most of the trip, following the great road of the Incas: the Camino Real, or Royal Road. Hand built over 500 years ago, it crosses the most difficult and dangerous mountains in all the Americas, diving into sweltering canyons and soaring up into the snows. 1500 miles, half of it on foot, take him from the Equator to Cuzco and the most magical city of all: Machu Picchu. He is attacked, gets lost and is trapped by floods, but only when he goes home does he lose what he wants most.

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This edition celebrates the centenary of Williams's birth. RAYMOND WILLIAMS (1921-1998) was the most influential socialist writer and thinker in post-war Britain. Now, for the first time, making full use of Williams's private and unpublished papers and by placing him in a wide social and cultural landscape, Dai Smith, in this highly original and much praised biography, uncovers how Williams's life to 1961 is an explanation of his immense intellectual achievement. "It is Smith's ambition to set out the lonely, almost monastic path Raymond took through childhood, army and adult education towards his deserved eminence. But the biographer's greatest achievement is to find his own discerning route through what often seems to be a jungle of contradiction... This is a worthwhile book and a very good one." - David Hare, The Guardian "It is a remarkable piece of work and will henceforth be essential to the understanding of the making of Raymond Williams." - Eric Hobsbawm "Becomes at once the authoritative account... Smith has done all that we can ask the historian as biographer to do." - Stefan Collini, London Review of Books "Carrying an impressive deal of intensive research lightly... the portraiture throughout is graphic, richly detailed and subtly shaded... in these packed, lucidly written pages..." - Terry Eagleton, New Welsh Review

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'Over the last twenty five years, almost single-handedly, Peter Lord has transformed a collection of poorly understood evidence of art created in Wales, and lazy theoretical assumptions about it, into a discipline in its own right, equipped with analytical frameworks and supported by an accumulating body of knowledge.' -Andrew Green, Wales Arts Review (on The Tradition) The six sequential essays in this collection provide a narrative of a century and a half of Welsh painting, written with an emphasis on issues of social class and national identity. Through his earlier writing, Peter Lord has contributed to the establishment of an historical tradition of Welsh painting, but because it does not feature in the wider story of western art history as presently told, the work revealed continues to be perceived as marginal, existing in isolation from ideas and movements in other countries. These essays break new ground by discussing the concerns of Welsh painters not only in domestic terms but also in the context of the ways in which artists in other parts of Europe and in the United States reacted to the common underlying causes of those concerns. The author challenges the idea that the work of Welsh painters is relevant only to the evolution of their own communities and, through confident and detailed analysis, validates their pictures also in terms of the arts of other western cultures.

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"We had been in the cottage for a week when the cormorant was delivered, that October evening." When a young family inherit a remote mountain-side cottage in north Wales, giving them the chance to change the course of their lives and start over, the one condition of the will seems strange but harmless. They are to care for a cormorant until the end of its life. But the bird is no tame pet, and within its natural state of wildness there is a malevolent intelligence and intent towards sharp, unexpected violence. However, it is the fascination it holds for Harry, the couple's precious only child, that really threatens their dreams of rural contentment. A Somerset Maugham Award Winner when it was first published, the tale of The Cormorant continues to exert its considerable power.

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HELLO FRIEND WE MISSED YOU is a deeply poignant and bleakly comic debut novel about loneliness, the 'violent revenge thriller' category on Netflix, solipsism, rural gentrification, Jack Black, and learning to exist in the least excruciating way possible. Its story of depression and death on the small Welsh island of Mon, of people armed with every social media completely failing to communicate, is far, far funnier than it has any right to be. It's also, ultimately, extremely moving. An incredible debut novel from a truly unique prose stylist.

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It's 1954 and nine-year-old Mira's life is about to change forever. After a typhoid outbreak rages through her town, robbing her of her parents and siblings, the orphaned child is forced to live with her mysterious, depressive Aunt Hana, a figure both frightening and fragile.Gradually, Mira uncovers the secrets of their troubled family history and begins to understand why her aunt is so incapable of trusting herself and the world around her. Deftly weaving two separate timelines, the harrowing reasons behind Hana's reclusive way of life, the guilt she wears as palpably as a cloak, and the tattoo on her wrist, are revealed to Mira. Alena Mornstajnova's gripping novel, which is based on real events, has won numerous awards and been translated into over a dozen languages across the world.

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Translated by Caroline Waight Kristian Bang Foss’ darkly comic, prize-winning road-novel satire sees two unlikely friends set out to defy the Danish welfare state – and Death himself – with both hilarious and tragic consequences. Life is looking pretty bleak for Asger. After a fiasco at work finds him unceremoniously booted from both his advertising job and his family home, he finds himself the carer of Waldemar, arguably Denmark’s sickest man. Their initial days together in a Copenhagen ghetto only serve to pile on the hopelessness. But then Waldemar hatches a plan: fabled healer Torbi el Mekki offers a miracle cure to all who seek an audience. Only thing is, he’s in Morocco – over two thousand miles and another continent away. Piling into a beaten-up Volkswagen, the two set off on a zany road trip across Europe towards a dubious salvation. But it soon seems they may have unwanted company, for on their tail is a pitch-black Audi... “Tender and indignant, satiric and apocalyptic, wildly, flamingly funny.” - Weekendavisen “With Kristian Bang Foss, the devil created the world, both nature and culture, both the desert and the local authorities. This creates devilish humor and poetry. It is hopelessly sad and it is damn funny.” - Politiken

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Brenda Chamberlain lived a life of artistic engagement with the world. She published a compelling body of literary work and held solo exhibitions in London and Wales, while her work was shown in over thirty group shows. Her brilliance was mirrored by the journey of her personal life, including marriage to fellow artist and Royal Academy student John Petts, the long relationship with the Frenchman Jean Van der Bijl, the life-long friendship with the German aristocrat Karl von Laer and her eventual journey to Hydra where she lived for many years before returning to Bangor, Wales. Jill Piercy draws upon extensive research gathered from public and private collections and from interviews with Chamberlain’s friends in Britain, Germany and Greece.

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Winner of the 2011 European Union Prize for Literature At the age of nineteen they handed you a rifle with a bayonet and dressed you up in a uniform ... and somehow, you managed to get your hands on a little, dark brown notebook and a pen. After the funeral, a grieving son starts reading the diary his dead father had kept during the Second World War. As he turns each page, searching for a trace of the man he remembers, a portrait of an individual unfolds; a figure made both strange and familiar through the handwritten observations, the yearnings and the confessions. Immanuel Mifsud tells a moving story of pain, warfare, and the things that connect us. As the narrator explores the diary and his own memories, he begins to recognise the man behind the words, the father whose death could release the truth of his life.

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`Superbly accomplished... Hughes' prose is startling and luminous' FINANCIAL TIMES`Beautifully nuanced and utterly touching'THE DAILY MAILBeside 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.In his fourth novel, award-winning author Tristan Hughes returns to the landscape of his youth in this vivid and poetic coming-of-age story about death, life, and the changes they bring. Set against the harsh, unforgiving beauty of the forests of northern Ontario, Hummingbird unravels a moving tale of loss, absence and redemption.

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Threon, the Vagabond King, is torn from a life in the palace by raiders and forced to scrape a living on the streets of a foreign land. Meeting a witch of the underworld, a rebel soldier and a woman cursed by a god, he seeks retribution through a quest to reclaim his home and throne. Together they rekindle old allegiances, face an immortal army and learn to trust one another. But when the gods begin to interfere with their plans, is it a curse or a blessing?

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For anyone struggling to conceive or have a child naturally, this straightforward self-help book could be the answer. Written in an easy-to-read style by consultant gynaecologist and obstetrician, Dr. Sean Watermeyer, the aim of the book is to enrich the knowledge of both individuals and couples so that the dream of having a child becomes a reality. Dr. Watermeyer has been helping couples to conceive, carry and deliver babies for over a decade, and now wants to share his expertise with as many people as possible. This comprehensive book explores the causes of infertility and miscarriage, available investigations and options and potential benefits, risks, and outcomes. It also provides a step-by-step guide to IVF. Filled with insightful detail, clinical case studies and clear diagrams, this book will also be a valuable tool for health professionals supporting couples experiencing fertility problems.

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