Search results for ""parthian books""

A young man's quest for beauty through literature, love, drugs and dreams becomes a mystical, lyrical classic from the father of supernatural horror. There is a foreword by Catherine Fisher one of whose acclaimed "Oracle" trilogy was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and is an international bestseller translated into over 20 languages. Originally published in 1907, it is widely regarded as Machen's finest lyrical work.

Read more less

Hereditation tells the story of the Sloane family. Living in New York in the middle of the 20th Century, brothers Erwin and Maynard share their brownstone Harlem house with their mother, a perpetually ill woman who has recently suffered the indignity of being abandoned by her philandering husband, Ezra.

Read more less

1949: Egypt's struggle against its British occupiers moves towards crisis; Israel declares its statehood, driving out the Arabs; Joe Roberts, an RAF sergeant, his wife Ailsa and daughter, Nia, leave Wales for Egypt.

Read more less

Wil says goodbye to his family and friends in North Wales, and hello to adventure in South America, heading into the unknown, away from comfort and predictability in a bid to 'let go'. From the beach he lives on with only a stray dog for company, to his final destination with its tearful goodbyes, Wil shares the joys and the trials of his search.

Read more less

Beca Lewis was so hoping for the fluffy toy pony she had seen in the shop window. But on her birthday there was only an envelope from her parents on the table. She didn't know that she would soon be hugging her own real live pony. Siani the Shetland is black and furry, with quite a mind of her own. To Beca she is a dream come true.

Read more less

Chronicles the poet's experience of being diagnosed with prostrate cancer, of undergoing surgery and then of entering recovery. This collection of poems summarises how many people feel towards a disease which is regarded with dread. It contains material, which is unsettling yet informative and thought provoking.

Read more less

Insightful and informative, this volume of essays offers a fresh outlook and critical appraisal of contemporary plays.

Read more less

Tracy is a kleptomaniac and a compulsive liar. A lost soul, she drifts fecklessly about, sponging off her friends with a high turnover of menial jobs as she searches for Anita. Tracy's thinks that if Anita's disappeared out of her life, then she must have disappeared out of this world, and that means detective work.

Read more less

In these linked short stories Sonia Edwards' characters spin out their interwoven lives; the shifting perspective of each story serving to illuminate another facet of truth and experience.

Read more less

The selected stories of one of Wales's leading writers, "Outside Paradise" is a testament to women of all ages. Sometimes bright and uplifting, sometimes dark and moving, Sian James's work celebrates life.

Read more less

This publication is a collection of poems, often provocative, sometimes funny. The words trace a development from ferocious performance poetry to an increasingly bittersweet seam of writing, challenging and honest.

Read more less

Jo is a young woman with a little girl. Life is a council estate and a married man who loves her. She begins as an intelligent single mother determined to get out of the poverty trap, but after her married lover gets her pregnant and leaves, she experiences a descent through love into hell.

Read more less

A romance that tells the story of a refugee named Gregor who has to find his way through a world of half-real and half-fantastic territories in a quest for his past and future. The book has won the National Eisteddfod Prose Medal as well as the BBC Wales Writer of the Year Award.

Read more less

Joe England explores the possible constitutional meltdown of a divided UK and its consequences, reflecting on Wales' position as the poorest nation of all. As a constitutional crisis looms, this book contemplates a reimagined Wales and what that would mean for its people.

Read more less

Feral Monster follows Jax and her noisy, opinionated brain as they navigate love, identity, class and family. Mashing up grime, R&B, soul, pop and rap, the soundtrack takes us from the high highs to low lows of the hormonal rollercoaster ofadolescence.

Read more less

A reliable and clean source of water is essential for any community, so it is easy to understand how important wells were for pre-modern peoples. More complex is the mystical relationship humans have developed with these sites, which are imbued with a sacredness that predates Christianity. Holy Wells of Wexford and Pembrokeshire is a series of five chapbooks celebrating holy wells in two regions with common ancestry and history. Since at least the Bronze Age, sea travel between these two lands has meant cross-fertilisation of traditions and common names associated with wells of both regions. Of significance is the long-standing friendship between two early Christian saints: David, who became the first Bishop of St Davids; and Aidan, born in Ireland, who spent time in Wales and then founded monasteries in Ireland, including at Ferns. In Oilgate, Wexford, there is a well dedicated to David and, at Whitesands near St Davids in Pembrokeshire, there is one named after Aidan. Each of the five books approaches the subject from different perspectives and mediums, including fiction, poetry and essays as well as photographs and prints.

Read more less

The first anthology of its kind in Wales, which finally sheds light on a largely hidden queer cultural history with the careful selection of over 40 short stories (1837-2018) including work by John Sam Jones, Sian James, Rhys Davies, Deborah Kay Davies, Aled Islwyn, and Kate North. New translations of Kate Roberts, Mihangel Morgan, Jane Edwards, Pennar Davies and Dylan Huw make available their compelling stories for the first time to a non-Welsh speaking readership. An accessible but scholarly introduction places the writers and their stories in their historical and literary contexts. In these stories gender refuses to be fixed: a dashing travelling companion is not quite who he seems in the intimate darkness of a mail coach, a girl on the cusp of adulthood gamely takes her father's place as head of the house, and an actor and patron are caught up in dangerous game-playing. In the more fantastical tales there are talking rats, flirtations with fascism, and escape from a post-virus 'utopia'. These are stories of sexual awakening, coming out and redefining one's place in the world. Release and a certain heady license may be found in the distant cities of Europe or north Africa, but the stories are for the most part located in familiar Welsh settings - a schoolroom, a provincial town, a mining village, a tourist resort, a sacred island. The intensity of desire, whether overt, playful, or coded, makes this a rich and often surprising collection that reimagines what being queer and Welsh has meant in different times and places.

Read more less

"Dear Adolf. Don't start anything. It's the Coal Trip." The dark clouds of war are gathering over Europe yet the inhabitants of the south Wales town of Penddawn have other things on their minds. There's rugby, of course, and religion, too, not to mention work, or the lack of it. Not to mention the annual trip to Tenby, and a chance to get sand in your shoes, and forget about both poverty and Hitler. But for one small boy the worlds of warfare and welfare mean very little: his mind is crammed full of books and the wonders they contain: he can dream of little else... The Last Coal Trip to Tenby is drenched in the warm sun of nostalgia, a heartwarming tale of abiding friendships, and a portrait of a community that's as close knit as an old cardigan. It's a novel written with vim and vigour and oodles of good humour, about a cast of endearing characters who will stay in the mind.

Read more less

The Crossing bridges the past and the present and connects Wales with America, as it tells of coal owners and coal workers in the age of great transatlantic liners and fortunes to be made. At its heart is a father’s search for his daughter in Welsh valleys no longer proud, where creaming off regeneration grants has replaced coal mining as a way of life and development parks now stand where once did pit head wheels. It follows a lifetime’s search for lost love, the sinking of a great ship in a great war, misplaced family and forlorn hopes where individual lives are shaped and fated in the shadow of modernity and the cold hand of progress. This brave, bold and challenging work conjures a vivid cast of characters into being and offering – with ready vim and ample vigour – their compelling, complex and ultimately telling story.

Read more less

This insightful and revealing collection of essays focuses on seven Welsh women who, in a range of imaginative ways, resisted the status quo in Wales, England and beyond during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Written by an acclaimed biographical historian, the essays not only challenge expectations about how women's lives were lived in the last two centuries, they also explore different ways of approaching biographical writing and understanding, as well as raising issues of gender and nationality. From the pioneer doctor and champion of progressive causes, Frances Hoggan, to the irrepressible twentieth-century novelist Menna Gallie, these women spoke out for what they believed in, and sometimes they paid the price. Although proud of their Welsh identity, they articulated it in a variety of ways, and each spent most of their adult lives outside Wales. They became familiar, and often controversial voices, on the page and platform in London, Oxford, Northern Ireland and internationally. Lady Rhondda and Edith Picton-Turbervill championed women's equality at the centre of power in Westminster, whilst Myvanwy and Olwen Rhys saw education as the key to change. Women's suffrage played a prominent part in the lives of these women and was especially central to Margaret Wynne Nevinson's thinking, writing and actions. The intelligence, determination and grit of these women is revealed through their stirring stories. Taken together, the essays critically investigate the challenges, setbacks and hard-won achievements of feisty women who rocked the boat over a period of 150 years.

Read more less

A remarkable new selection in translation from the preeminent Turkish poet, Haydar Ergulen. The poems have been translated by a team of 13 translators, who include the co-editors of the book.

Read more less

Casablanca, 1992. In a white Art Deco villa, a man is pushed down the marble staircase to his death. His murder, never truly explained, fractures a family, a way of life, and the minds of both his wife and his daughter. To survive, his nine-year-old granddaughter carefully suppresses her memories until twenty years later, when her life is once more ripped apart, this time by a disastrous love affair. Returning to Casablanca, she relives the tragedy of her grandfather's murder and the events surrounding it. But now she sees it all not simply through the eyes of an innocent child, but with an adult's awareness that things - and people - might not always be quite as they seem. In a beautifully constructed first-person narrative that shifts in time and place, young French-Moroccan writer Ma -Do Hamisultane weaves a delicate web of fact and fiction. Her prose - sometimes luminous, often powerfully cinematographic - has drawn comparisons with Marguerite Duras, one of France's most famous novelists and experimental film-makers.

Read more less

In July 2013, David Thatcher died of a drug overdose in America. More than you were was written by his daughter, to try to understand what came after. The result is a striking collection of poetry which explores addiction, family politics, childhood memories and grief. Her short, sharp poems home in on situations to reveal their complex relationship and the challenges she faced after losing him. Thatcher weaves the darkest memories - the murder of pets, the burning down of a childhood home, the blood stains on white tiles - with ones which betray a tenderness and love. A brave debut, More than you were, explores what it means to lose a father to an addiction and live on.

Read more less

This lively first collection from Susie Wild introduces a poet with a nomadic spirit, one that tramps humour, love and loss across the UK and the globe, trying to find a place to fit in. Better Houses Have Windows charts her moves, every six months to two years, from childhood to adult life with and wonder. In a state of constant displacement, she flits from tents and gypsy caravans to a short- lived stint at boarding school, from lodgings and house sitting to a two- floor rental she can finally call home.Here we have a half-remembered, half-made-up life of pub crawl dates and door-slam scars as she falls in and out of love and a life in boxes. On her journey, poems hunt fossils and comets, escape fires and great white sharks, consider life on other planets and the prophecies of white witches. While - in Wild's playful, take on the mundane world of removal vans, builders and letting agents - beds and language barriers are tested, areas are gentrified, lawns are mown and heart rates checked.Susie was Writer in Residence at the Mothership, Dorset (Summer 2016) and won a place on the Autumn Poetry Masterclass 2016 with Gillian Clarke and Imtiaz Dharker. Dharker. Her poetry has recently been selected as an Ink Sweat & Tears Pick of the Month and a First Thursday performance winner (judged by Amy Wack and Cynan Jones). Events are booked from September: Penned on the Bont (20 Sept, Bridgend), Howl (21 Sept, Swansea), Cardiff Book Festival (22 Sept), First Thursday (Cardiff, October), Made in Roath 2017, Poems & Pints Carmarthen, The Wheatsheaf (London, November) and many more TBC.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

`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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Translated by Marta Ziemelis Narcoses (translated from the Latvian Narkozes) is a collection of fresh, powerfully feminine and open poetry, never derivative nor contrived, but inspired by Gruntmane's direct and honest personal experience. Full of life and love, joy, and pain, Narcoses is written with keen psychological insight and a courageous amount of self-awareness, to establish an intimacy and trust between poet and reader. Narcoses is part of the 'Parthian Baltic' project. The project was launched at the Parthian poetry festival at the Wheatsheaf and the London Book Fair 2018 (focus region: Baltics).

Read more less

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?

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

"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.

Read more less

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..."

Read more less

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...

Read more less

"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.

Read more less

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".

Read more less