Search results for ""parthian books""

Exploring a boy's childhood in Barcelona during the Franco dictatorship, "Under the Dust" is based on the autobiographical experience of prize-winning Catalan author Jordi Coca. In period and location - an oppressive late 1940s and early 50s when the dictatorship's repression was strongly felt at all levels of people's everyday lives - the novel echoes the recent bestseller "The Shadow of the Wind". But the affecting closeness of the boy's first-person narrative and its pitiless realism set this book apart. The boy's bewildered responses to his father's violence and authoritarianism are played out at home and in a neighbourhood dominated by street gangs, where politics is never more than a block away. This novel was awarded the Sant Jordi prize in 2000. "A tough implacable novel that makes no concessions...its ending has a rawness to chill the spirit of the hardiest reader." - Avui.

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"Adventure Holiday" is the newest poetry book by one of Wales's most original voices. It tells the story in verse and prose of a pilgrim's descent into chaos, conflagration and oblivion, and of his eventual renewal and rebirth. The experience of reading "Adventure Holiday" is an exciting and satisfying mix of the traditional with the wholly contemporary.

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A boy comes of age near Swansea. He belongs to the baby-boom generation but this is a time and place of bust. Eight-strong at the offset, his group of friends includes Will, a council estate intellectual, and Karen, who graduates from lonely cocktails on the dance floor to convivial militant vandalism. But first love ends for two of them in sordid circumstances, and the group is three down at the finish, when the narrator faces an uncertain future. This novel explores the emergence of political identity, which grows from class to national consciousness and celebrates that brand of idealism that has never since the early Eighties recaptured its clarity of purpose.

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High Fidelity for post-student women coming to terms with their men and their bands. A quirky battle of the senses for Ally, narrator with attitude and an unfortunate crush on the lead singer of Mr Big.

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This title is an anthology of writing from disabled people in Wales. It contains poetry, stories and fiction.

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This work provides 42 poems by Welsh writer Richard Gwyn, which are packed with exotic smells, metaphysical surprises, myths of home and the occasional jack wielding a punch. His other works include "Defying Gravity", "One Night in Icarus Street" and "Stone Dog, Flower Red".

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A brooding, murder mystery that hinges on the dark edges of imagination. A death on the mountain but no body, only rumours. Elan has been missing for two years. Her people presume she has abandoned the mountain to live with the Travellers who collect crystals from the quarries every Summer. Nye John, a friend of Elan, lives alone in a remote cottage on the far side of the Brechfa. He has lost valuable stock to unaccountable kills over the winter. He forms a theory that wolves from the North are running on the High Vans again. Not many people believe him but it is enough to start a rumour of something unaccounted for on the mountain. Elan's brother Cain still farms his land to the rim of the Vans. He has also lost stock to unaccountable kills. He needs to believe there are only rumours hiding on the open mountain. The rumours grow as the winter begins to grip the mountain and the truth decides to come down from the High Vans.

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Consisting of short stories, poems, essays, cartoons and comics, Cawl is an anthology of one multi-prizewinning, funny, angry young man's creative endeavours and social and political frustrations. Traditionally Cawl is a mix of everything thrown into one stew pot and left to simmer, boil over and be savoured. Here Sion Tomos Owen invites the reader to choose what to taste next. The meat of the essays, the parsnip of poetry, the spud of satire or the OXO cube of comedy. Ranging in genre from gritty realism, macabre, sci-fi and comic writing, his is a collection that can be interpreted as an anthology of more than one writer but written by one author. The poems range from short rhyming poems to long free form but consist mainly of valleysbased Cwm on'en butt poetry including a centre-piece reinterpretation of Rhydwen Williams' epic 'In Praise of a Valley' from his Rhondda Poems. The cartoons are a mix of comic-strip style social humour and satirical cartoons, heavily influenced by Martin Rowson, Art Spiegelman and Gren.The essays blend humour and frustrated social commentary on Wales and particularly the political situation in the valleys, and are entrenched in stagnant Labour idealism while hoping for change that can only come from the people themselves.

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Arrest Me For I Have Run Away is a stunning short story collection on human nature and identity. Stevie Davies' latest work, it is bound to captivate and charm the reader.

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It's another long day chopping beef carcasses for former reality TV star and Iron Man contender, Caleb Jenkins. His world unravelled when his parents' carpet business went bust last year, yet another casualty of the financial crisis. He's now trying to manage the mental health of his conspiracy-theorist brother while paying a mortgage and keeping a roof over his parents' heads. Caleb's own "complicated" personal life has imploded along with his impossible credit score. And in the rear view mirror politicians of all persuasions are promising him real change. Caleb is on the edge.

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New edition of one of Parthian’s most acclaimed recent titles, complete with a stunning redesigned jacket. Ironopolis is a warren of streets, memories and people with secrets... Glen James Brown orchestrates a remarkable novel across these streets as Ironopolis tells its own story across three generations. Jean unveils a secret on her deathbed... Alan unravels the truth of his father, a man who has haunted the Burn Council Estate for a lifetime... Corina is just trying to get through one last day at the hairdressers before she closes it for good. And then there is the ageless Peg Powler, myth and reality, stalking them all...

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No artist has been more committed to recording and interpreting such environments than George Little. Born in the east end of Swansea in 1927 he grew up next to the abandoned copper works, slag heaps and still-busy docks of Dylan Thomas's 'ugly, lovely town'.

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Norman Schwenk's animal stories are a long way from Disneyland. They focus on the strange, complicated links people forge with animals, and how they illuminate the even more mysterious links people have with other people.

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For a man who has spent almost a lifetime waiting to be King, Huw Thomas reveals how Wales prepared Charles for the crown. Despite his initial reluctance to come to Wales as a student, his time spent learning the history and language of the Welsh at Aberystwyth in the 1960s fostered a passionate commitment to the nation. Wales has not always returned the compliment, with popular protests and more subtle snubs to his involvement in Welsh affairs. And yet those who have worked with him, and who call him a friend, cite a remarkable ability to make a difference without making a fuss. As a diplomat he is credited with bringing major employers to south Wales, offering jobs to a workforce that had been decimated by the collapse of the coal industry. As a cultural ambassador he revived royal patronage for the arts in Wales and sponsored the finest performers to emerge from the land of song. And as a champion of the natural environment, he has backed the farmers and conservationists who are nurturing the Welsh countryside, not least by employing traditional crafts to create the first royal home in Wales for 400 years.

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Family connections, unconventional friendships, love and loss: the twelve stories in this collection of new contemporary fiction by the winners of the 2022 Rhys Davies Short Story Competition present characters seeking solace, self-discovery and self-fulfilment as they navigate familiar and unfamiliar territory. Two sisters search for the last available Christmas tree while coming to terms with their mother's death; a stammering teen hitches a lift with a Welsh Elvis; a man participates in his 'endgame'; and a teacher and pupil create their very own time machine. From hillside encounters to conversations in homes, shops and on the street, these are stories about people and place, about relationships and revelations, peppered with memories and re- imaginings. These are stories where some voices are silenced and others get to sing. The Rhys Davies Short Story Competition recognises the very best unpublished short stories in English in any style by writers aged 18 or over who were born in Wales, have lived in Wales for two years or more, or are currently living in Wales. Originally established in 1991, Parthian is delighted to publish the 2022 winning stories on behalf of the Rhys Davies Trust and in association with Swansea University's Cultural Institute.

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It has the privacy and immediacy of a diary but holds the interest like a novel. It follows the adventures, trials and tribulations of Nuibin Amhlaigh who keeps getting into trouble in his good soldier’s progress through army life. A lost treasure of Irish writing translated for the first time into English.

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How can we have hope in a world that is dying? With a forensic eye, Howells takes us on a journey through ordinary human lives and the extraordinary natural world we are in danger of losing. The carder bee carries the story of a colony, a species, and, ultimately, the fate of all life on earth. The mermaid weaves an almost beautiful tale of a tragic miscarriage. The magpie writes yearning letters to her lost lover. The brilliant kingfisher flits through the mind of a woman with dementia. Through each exacting portrait, we begin to understand something special, a language of bees, and discover for ourselves how intimately we are all connected and what the natural world is trying to tell us.

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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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EDITED BY ELAINE CANNING INTRODUCED BY JULIA BELL A collection of new contemporary short stories by Welsh writers, comprising twelve diverse stories about human relationships between people and places, representing the winners of the 2021 Rhys Davies Short Story Competition. Including short biographical notes on the authors and an introduction by Guest Judge Julia Bell, a writer and Course Director of the MA Creative Writing at Birbeck, University of London The Rhys Davies Short Story Competition is a distinguished national writing competition for writers born or living in Wales. Originally established in 1991, Parthian is delighted to publish the 2021 winning stories on behalf of the Rhys Davies Trust and in association with Swansea University's Cultural Institute. Previous winners of the prize have included Leonora Brito, Tristan Hughes and Kate Hamer.

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Kohon and Toni Griffiths’ stunning translation has the power to transport you to the 1960s, to Buenos Aires, to those first overpowering experiences of sexual love. Odetta in Babylon and the Canada Express invites you to step onto the train, and to let go. Lose yourself in the music and enjoy the journey, wherever it takes you.

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Expertly translated into English by Amaia Gabantxo - arguably the most prestigious contemporary Basque to English translator - Hezurren Erretura [Burning Bones] is a companion piece to Miren Agur Meabe's A Glass Eye, a collection of short stories that complement the universe of Meabe's novel about absence as an engine for creation, about what we make out of the things we lose--her eye, in the author's case, or love, or the innocence of youth. Miren Agur Meabe is one of Basque literature’s leading contemporary writers and the winner of several national awards. She is the only writer to win Spain’s national poetry prize in the Basque language. In a series of short poetic narratives Burning Bones finds the writer on a remarkable journey of imagination, discovery and emotion. From a flooded river stranding a dolphin on a sandbank to a sailor afraid to venture onto land while a first kiss is cut tragically short Meabe plays with the expectations and form of stories while offering a rhapsody of reflection and reinvention.

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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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He comes each week to loosen his limbs, lose some weight, make the heart beat stronger, longer. This is a skilful collection by a poet well acquainted with relative place: wherever a poem lives, it always remembers its place in the world. Indeed, juxtapositions and connections – with place, culture, and among humans – are where the poet flexes his muscle – ‘works out’ his ideas. The poet gazes outward and inward with the same critical eye: he kindly refuses to judge the humans in his poems, instead offering them up as precise portraits, and even in dialect, never caricatures. The poet is never far from the frame, sharing in our delight, disappointment, upset, and wonder.

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Translated by Christina E. Kramer Gavdos: a remote island south of Crete, the southernmost point of Europe, surrounded by an endless expanse of sea. To Oksana, who has come from Ukraine with her friends to recover from illness in the aftermath of Chernobyl, it seems like a dream to live in a blue-and-white house with a lemon tree. To Penelope, a Greek woman who was married off to an unsuitable man by nuns from the convent where she spent her teenage years, it is a kind of prison. Their two narratives, interwoven with other stories - of the other women of the sparse community, of their own past lives and loves - are skilfully combined with themes of otherness and the notions of 'foreign' and 'barbaric' in this poetic and timely short novel by acclaimed Macedonian writer Petar Andonovski, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. Translated from Macedonian

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When the north Wales-born actor and playwright Emlyn Williams performed his one-man show about Dylan Thomas, the critic Richard Findlater described him as ‘unravelling a ladder of words’ which he then climbs up, and pulls the spectators after him. Findlater called this ‘the Cambrian rope trick’, highlighting the process by which writers, and Welsh writers in particular, use the power of language to take an audience into an unfamiliar world. This volume brings together three Welsh plays from the middle of the twentieth century: Rhondda Roundabout (1939) by Jack Jones, from his own novel, a panoramic view of politics, religion, sport and music in the Valleys, described by the Sunday Times critic James Agate as ‘too good for the West End’, The Druid’s Rest (1944) by Emlyn Williams, a semi-autobiographical comedy about the fantasy life of an over-imaginative boy who suspects that an Englishman on a walking tour is actually a famous murderer, and After My Fashion (1952) by Diana Morgan, in which the widows of men who died on a Tibetan expedition discover untold secrets when approached by a film company, inspired by the Cardiff-born author’s own experiences as a screenwriter at Ealing Studios, which also formed the basis for the recent novel and film Their Finest. Edited and with an introduction by David Cottis, and following on from A Dirty Broth, which looked at the pioneers of the Welsh theatre in English, A Ladder of Words explores the period either side of the Second World War, a time when Welsh playwrights enjoyed unprecedented commercial success, both at home and in the West End. David Cottis is Lecturer in Scriptwriting at Middlesex University, and a theatre writer/director. He lives in London and Cardiff.

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Marcia Pullman has been found dead at home in the leafy suburbs of Bulawayo. Chief Inspector Edmund Dube is onto the case at once, but it becomes increasingly clear that there are those, including the dead woman’s husband, who do not want him asking questions. The case drags Edmund back into his childhood to when his mother’s employers disappeared one day and were never heard from again, an incident that has shadowed his life. As his investigation into the death progresses, Edmund realises the two mysteries are inextricably linked and that unravelling the past is a dangerous undertaking threatening his very sense of self.

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Two Irish migrants on the cusp of new lives in post-war Britain. Two young people who dare to dream of a better life, and dance the music of survival in their adopted homeland. Afraid that his wife and children will arrive over any day, Trevor is in a hurry to settle old scores with his rivals and to prove himself the top fighting man within his London-Irish community of drinkers and navvies while Nano seeks to escape the stifling conformity and petty jealousies of her peers and forget her failed love-match at home. Will Trevor finally prove himself "the man" and secure the respect that he feels is his by virtue of blood and tribe? Does Nano have it in her to break free of the suffocating bonds of home and community and find love with Lithuanian beau Julius? Written at a time when the Irish were "building England up and tearing it down again," and teeming with the raucous energy of post-war Kilburn, Cricklewood and Camden Town this novel is one of the very few authentic portrayals of working-class life in modern Irish literature. Up to one in four UK citizens claims Irish heritage. For each decade of the 1950s alone - a time of British postwar boom and Irish economic decline - over half of Ireland's population, those coming of age in that decade, emigrated: the majority to England. And while Irish-owned companies today account for one tenth of the almost GBP100bn British construction industry, those navvies who built our homes, roads and hotels comprise a forgotten generation, alongside the nurses that made the crossing alone to power our nascent Welfare State. Donall Mac Amhlaigh was among them, working on construction sites throughout London and the Midlands, including the M1 and M6 motorways. In this autobiographical novel are the people who later calcified into stereotypes of Irish immigrants and their haunts: the navvy, the drinker, the fighter, the nurse. As with the Polish builder, Romanian gangster or Spanish nurse of today, such caricatures have their source in real lives adapting to economic reality. 'A wonderful addition to Irish literature.' - Colum McCann, National Book Award winner 'I cannot stress strongly enough the importance of bringing this work to a wider readership.' -Tony Murray - Director, Irish Studies Centre, London Metropolitan University, London. 'Donall Mac Amhlaigh is the most perceptive and informed writer on the Irish in 20th century Britain.' - Professor Enda Delaney, author of The Irish in Post-War Britain

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These creative nonfiction essays consider girlhood, motherhood, violence at home and abroad, violence against women, the consolation in writing, trauma, and redemption. The essays celebrate and interrogate popular and literary culture: for example the film Breakfast at Tiffany's, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Alun Lewis's love letters, David Bowie's `Life on Mars', or the poet John Burnside's writings about his abusive father. These timely meditations on women, ethics, and writing bring insights that only an immigrant and traveller like Brigley could provide.

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In October 1957 Marlon Brando married a young studio actress called Anna Kashfi. He was thirty-three and at the pinnacle of his beautiful fame having recently won an Oscar for On the Waterfront. The wedding was front-page news around the world. His new bride was twenty-three, claimed to be an Indian princess and was pregnant. The day after the wedding a factory worker living in Wales, William O'Callaghan, revealed that Brando's bride was in fact his daughter, Joan O'Callaghan and had been a butcher's assistant from Cardiff. This book sets out to discover who was telling the truth and who was lying – and, perhaps more importantly, why?

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A Sunday Times bestseller. A miraculous true-life Second World War survival story that is being featured on the BBC's ONE SHOW (The show attracts on average a daily audience of 5 million viewers) with a ten minute dramatised documentary to be broadcast in early October 2018. A Daily Mail true life story feature is in development. Further review and BBC radio coverage Trade Advertising to accompany the release `I could see that still no one had been able to get out from the cockpit. It must have been at this moment that I thought I was going to die because I became remarkably calm'. Trapped inside a burning Lancaster bomber, 20,000 feet above Berlin, airman John Martin consigned himself to his fate and turned his thoughts to his fiancee back home. In a miraculous turn of events, however, the twenty-one-year-old was thrown clear of his disintegrating airplane and found himself parachuting into the heart of Nazi Germany. He was soon to be captured and began his period as a prisoner of war. This engaging and compulsively readable true-life account of a Second World War airman, who cheated death in the sky, only to face interrogation and the prospect of being shot by the Gestapo, before having to endure months of hardship as a prisoner of war.

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Blending the naturalistic and the fabulistic, these elusive, delicate stories fold fable and fairy tale into the everyday, domestic settings of kitchen, garden, car. Women love, and lose, strange creatures they find by the garden gate; dream dogs are liberated from the icy prison of a fridge; bathrooms bloom into rainforests that souls can lose themselves in forever. Seemingly quotidian routines and unremarkable lives are pierced by Kovalyk’s precise, sensual prose, to reveal the magic lurking just beneath the surface of the daily skin of existence.

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Moving On bristles with the talent of writers from Zimbabwe. This collection brings together twenty of Zimbabwe's finest storytellers, from within the country and without.

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One of the outstanding literary figures of the twentieth century, the Welsh poet and playwright Dylan Thomas is as famous for his poetry as he is for his dissolute, Bohemian lifestyle and tempestuous personal life. In The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas, journalist Hilly Janes explores the poet's life and extraordinary legacy through the eyes of her father, the artist Alfred Janes. A member of Thomas's inner circle, he painted the poet at three key moments: in 1934, 1953 and, posthumously in 1964, portraits which are at the heart of Janes' work. Drawing on her own personal archive, including drawings, diaries, letters and new interviews with Thomas's friends and descendants, The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas traces the course of the poet's life, from his birthplace in Swansea to his untimely death in a New York hospital in 1953.

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A collection about the fluidity of time and place, Rebel Sun charts our gradual unraveling; the compulsion to transform and shape-shift, to slowly unwind roots from the earth - grow fin and feather, know water and sky.Michael Sheen performed a poem Sophie McKeand had written for the 50th Anniversary of the Abarfan Disaster at Wales Millennium Centre in 2016:http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/local-news/michael-sheen-gives-moving-recital-12018594.Following the success of our crowdfunder for Cawl by Sion Tomos Owen in 2016, this is our next crowdfunder in 2017. Support this project here. Sophie McKeand is a mesmerising performer and TED talker. She has gigged regularly across the UK and will make videos and offer some very special perks for those wanting to pledge their support.

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In these poems, women raise their voices and subvert the age-old tales told on their behalf: Roman goddess Salacia explores her tumultuous relationship with Neptune; Gwen Ellis, the first woman hanged for witchcraft in Wales, reflects on her impending fate; a Queen bee is usurped by her daughter and depression visits in the emaciated form of an old and forgotten friend.

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FROM THE AUTHOR OF A VAN OF ONE'S OWN When Biddy Wells's elderly mother is suddenly struck down with a mysterious illness, Biddy moves her into the spare bedroom, little knowing how long the period of convalescence will last. Through the months that follow, the two women have to re-inhabit the close domestic proximity that they'd abandoned decades before and learn how to co-exist within a tangled web of emotional need, resentment and dependence. Eventually, Biddy manages to find a supported flat that's ideal for her mother. She settles quickly and, abandoning her morbidly stoic outlook on life, falls passionately in love with another resident. Biddy can only watch from the sideline as her mother embarks on an unlikely romance. Told with humour, wry insight, and refreshing honesty, Scrabble in the Afternoon examines the complicated, frustrating and ultimately rewarding story of how a daughter can come to terms with caring wholeheartedly for a mother. It also shows how a mother and daughter relationship can change and develop as life continues to offer fresh challenges and joys.

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New Baltic Poetry is a collection celebrating the diversity of writing from the three Baltic countries; Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Six of the most talented poets from each country are translated and published in English, in many cases for the first time, providing a taste of the fresh, dynamic literary scene in the contemporary Baltic states.This collection includes poetry by Benediktas Janusevicius, Antanas A. Jonynas, Giedre Kazlauskaite, Indrek Hirv, Helena Laks, Mats Traat, Kai Aareleid, and others. It was launched at the Parthian poetry festival at the Wheatsheaf and the London Book Fair 2018 (focus region: Baltics).

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"Portugal is not all that far away, or exotic, or dangerous, but it felt like a huge stretch for me to leave my partner, family, job and home and just go off. An overland solo trip lasting months in an ancient little campervan was not the kind of thing I did. But it was something I was about to do."In her debut memoir A Van of One's Own, Biddy Wells tells the story of how, propelled by a thirst for peace and quiet, for a modest adventure and, perhaps, for freedom, she left for Portugal on her own, with only her old campervan, Myfawny, and her GPS, Tanya, for company. Having left just about everything behind, her solo trip forces her to face her fears, her past, and herself. The road provides the perfect canvas to connect the dots between a past breakdown and her present need for freedom, as she reflects on her own life, her relationship, her family and the world around her - to see whether her life still has room for her in it. As she meets wise and not-so- wise people, members of the campervan community and friendly locals, her outlook on life begins to shift, and a chance meeting in a bar leads to the person who will put her on the right track.But will she go back home, to Wales?And what is the meaning of 'home? 'A Van of One's Own is a journey through the breath-taking scenery of France, Spain, and finally Portugal, populated by colourful characters and the roar of the ocean, the taste of fresh fish and the grind of the asphalt; but more importantly, it is a journey through past memories and present conflicts to inner peace.

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For around twenty years, Nick Fisk believed that one day he would find a letter on his doormat from Cardiff City FC requesting his services on the football pitch. When he realised it was unlikely he was ever going to be offered the role of groundsman, he decided the next best thing would be to write about the club instead. A former member of the not especially notorious non-hooligan gang, The Sad Crew, Fisk has plenty of experience to draw from, in terms of going to football matches, and coming up with ridiculous chants that nobody ever joins in with. In The Blues Are Back in Town Nick charts the 2014/15 season, following the team and its fans, and trying to rediscover his passion for the recently relegated club, while at the same time, reflecting on the good old days. The blog he kept, The Fisk Report, gave an insight into not just what it's like to be a typical fan, but what supporting The Bluebirds is like through the eyes of a Fisk. It is a funny, enigmatic and personal book about the passion and belief of being a football fan.

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With passion, humour and remarkable insight Gwyn Thomas captures the world of South Wales in the 1830s during the turbulent years of the Merthyr and Newport Risings. As the newly-built foundries enter their first decline, a travelling harpist from the rural north arrives in one of the new towns to find his friends caught in a fiercely-fought industrial dispute, a dispute which quickly spirals out of control. A powerful and sweeping novel by one of Wales's great literary figures, 'All Things Betray Thee', tells the epic story of a people, their joys and victories, but also their sorrows and defeats.

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At the heart of Dai Country - the central valleys of twentieth-century South Wales from the 1930s to the 1970s - was the metropolis of Pontypridd, and it is from this vantage point in time and space that Alun Richards cast his baleful eye on the personal relationships and social ambitions of the inhabitants of this much-fabled country. In this compendium volume, the best of his short stories, as funny and savage as they are scathing and compassionate, are combined with his entrancing autobiographical memoir "Days of Absence" to take us to the core of those incomparable valleys, with their lived experience stripped bare for once of their usual cloak of cliche and sentiment.

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An experiment into the sources of the human brain through the mind of a young woman has gone horribly wrong. She has seen the great god Pan and will die giving birth to a daughter. Twenty years later feted society hostess Helen Vaughan becomes the source of much fevered speculation. Many men are infatuated with her beauty, but great beauty has a price, sometimes you have to pay with the only thing you have left. The Great God Pan was a sensation when first published in 1894. Its author, Arthur Machen, was a struggling unknown writer living in London. He had translated Casanova's memoirs and was living on a small inheritance. He immediately became one of the most talked-about writers of the last years of the nineteenth century, while the publication marked the start of his ongoing influence on modern fantasy and horror. Machen's dark imaginings of the reality behind ancient beliefs feature again in the acclaimed, mesmerising short story 'The White People' and the curious tale 'The Shining Pyramid', also in this volume.

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One of Merthyr's Victorian brickyard girls, Saran watches the world parade past her doorstep on the banks of the stinking and rat-infested Morlais Brook: the fair-day revellers; the chapel-goers and the funeral processions. She never misses a trip to the town's wooden theatres, despite her life ruled by the 5 a.m. hooter, pit strikes, politics and the First World War that takes away so many of her children. Her Glyn will work a treble shift for beer money; her brother Harry is the district's most notorious drinker and fighter until he is 'saved'. The town changes and grows but Saran is still there for Glyn, for Harry, for her children and grandchildren. In his 1935 novel "Black Parade", writer, soldier and political activist Jack Jones creates a superbly riotous, clear and unsentimental picture of Merthyr life as his home town reels headlong into the twentieth century.

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The Alone to the Alone unites Gwyn Thomas's lyrical and philosophical flights of narrative in a satire whose savagery is only relieved by irrepressible laughter. It is Gwyn Thomas' most shaped work: the underlying meaning of South Wales' history is not so much documented as laid bare for universal dissection and dissemination. The novel, with its distinctive plural narration, is a choric commentary on human illusion and knowledge, on power and its attendant deprivation, on dreams and their destruction.

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This arresting series of documentary photographs shows the life and landscape of five small settlements in South Wales. These communities in the Afan Valley, after the pit closures, had to deal with high levels of unemployment and found themselves with severe adjustment problems.

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It was a period of Welsh politics that has become etched in the collective memory. The rise of a Welsh independence movement and the first Plaid Cymru Member of Parliament. The Labour Party searching for a way forward in political climate that was riven with dissension and eventual rancour.

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