Search results for ""Parthian""

These sharp, ironic and compelling stories are perfect hard gems of observation about the truths of everyday life: kindness and friendship balance precariously with obsession and desire.

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In a lonely house deep in the Black Mountains of south Wales, a man spends insomniac nights absorbed in the ancient texts left him by his mysterious aunt. When a blue tent appears in the field at the end of his garden, his solitary life is turned inside out. But who owns the tent? And when the tent's occupants emerge, whose story are they telling? As his life unravels, the man begins to question whether he is the orchestrator or the victim of his own experiences. Are the stories that guide or steer his life - any life - real, or merely the echo of other, possible lives?

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"The Book of Katerina is a gleefully sardonic novel about illness and family, and how we can never quite cure ourselves of either." - GLEN JAMES BROWN Award-winning and prolific author of novels, plays, novellas, short story collections and translations. A popular stage adaptation of the novel, directed by Yorgos Nanouris, won critical acclaim and was presented to UK audiences in 2016. 'My name is Katerina, and I died by a route dark and lonely, for there was too much in me I could bear no longer.' In this acclaimed Greek novel, Auguste Corteau imagines his own mother's inner life, observing with wit and earthy humour the saga of her extended family's ups and downs in the city of Thessaloniki over three generations. From the poverty of the early years through to affluence and aspirations of grandeur, Katerina drags her husband and son into the chaos of her life: sicknesses are hidden, siblings fight for love and attention while feckless husbands and unwanted children are riven through the family story.

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Jess has lived peaceably in Shrewsbury with her husband Jacob for many years. He is solid, dependable, beautiful to her. She is contented to be his wife, to look after his elderly mother, aunt and cousin, to be a pillar of their family and community. Then, suddenly, everything changes. Now Jess must question the entire basis on which she has lived so many years of her life. Must discover whether the identity she has created has really been so valuable to herself and to those around her, and whether there is a different – angry, passionate, fulfillable – Jess waiting to get out.

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From the very beginnings of Wales, its people have defined themselves against their large neighbour. Wales: England's Colony? shows, that relationship has not only defined what it has meant to be Welsh, it has also been central to making and defining Wales as a nation.

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Debut novel from Rachel Trezise, winner of the Orange Futures Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. The story of a brutal childhood in the Welsh Valleys. Rebecca is trying to grow up fast but the whole world’s against her. She falls in love, gets drunk and takes drugs. There are things she needs to forget. But when writing and books take hold of her life she starts to come up from the bottom.

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“There is no short-story writer who has quite the same gift of infectious vitality, whose scenes and characters seem to come so spontaneously alive” Times Literary SupplementRhys Davies achieved an international reputation as a writer of skill and originality. He wrote for the best magazines of 1930s through to the New Yorker in the 1950s, maintaining a prolific output of both stories and novels.In this Library of Wales edition, with a foreword by Tomos Owen, the essence of his work is revealed with a new selection of dark, witty and finely crafted stories.

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Winner of the Writers' Trust of Canada Journey Prize Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, Burrard Inlet is the body of water that divides Vancouver's North Shore from the rest of the Lower Mainland. In this collection of award-winning stories, Tyler Keevil uses that rugged landscape as a backdrop for characters who are struggling against the elements, each other, and themselves.A search-and-rescue volunteer looks for a missing snowboarder on Christmas Eve; two brothers retreat to the woods to shoot a film in memory of their dead friend; a reclusive forestry worker picks up a hitcher on his way down Mount Seymour; a young man finds a temporary haven on the ice barge where he works. Written in a lean, muscular style, these are stories awash in blood and brine, and steeped in images of freedom and confinement. Within that narrative framework, Burrard Inlet becomes more than a geographical location: it is a liminal space, a boundary and a barrier, a threshold to be crossed.

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At the age of fifty, towards the end of the First World War, W. H. Davies decided that he must marry. Spurning London society and the literary circles where he had been lionised since the publication of his Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, he set about looking for the right partner on the streets of London. Young Emma is a moving and revealing memoir told with disarming honesty and humour. Davies records his life with three women: from his affair with Bella, the wife of a Sergeant Major, to his year-long liaison with the gentle Louise, to the turbulent brushes with a society woman who fears for her own life at his hands. He finally meets Emma, then pregnant, at a bus-stop on the Edgware Road. This is the story of their love affair.

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This rich biography tells the remarkable tale of Margaret Haig Thomas who became the Second Viscountess Rhondda. She was a Welsh suffragette, held important posts during the First World War and survived the sinking of the Lusitania. A leading British industrialist, she was also instrumental in securing a seat for women in the House of Lords. Closely associated with figures such as Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain and George Bernard Shaw, she founded and edited the weekly paper Time and Tide, which dazzled British society with its cutting-edge perspectives. It championed progressive views on women's rights in the 1920s, became a leading literary space for women and men from the thirties onwards and a respected political commentator on national and international affairs. Drawing upon a rich array of sources, many previously unused, Angela V. John explores both the public achievements and the fascinating private world of one of the movers and shakers of British society in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Up ahead, Helen saw the police line harden into a barricade of bodies and shields. Resin batons thudded on Perspex shields; slow, thuggish, brutal. Goosebumps studded her arms and legs. Her pace slowed to the truncheons' beat. Mary halted a yard from the riot shields, raised her megaphone. 'We are women from Ystrad an' from all over Wales,' she said. 'We are here to make peaceful protest. Here in solidarity with the men.' The drumming quickened. Trouble is brewing in Ystrad. It is time to defend jobs, the pits and a way of life that has formed both the life of valley and the nation. The union is squaring up to the Coal Board, the government, the country. Gwyn Pritchard, overman at Blackthorn colliery, believes that the way to save his pit is to keep the mine open and production high. His men disagree and when an old collier dies on Gwyn's shift, the men's simmering resentment spills over into open defiance. But Gwyn faces a challenge at home too. His daughter Helen is in love with a fiery young collier, Scrapper Jones. In March 1984, when miners across the country begin the long strike, Scrapper throws himself into the struggle and Helen joins the women, preparing food for the soup kitchen and standing with the men on the picket line. Helen and Gwyn must decide which side they are on as the year-long dispute drives the Pritchard family apart and the Jones family to ruin. What matters most: to be right, to be loved or to belong?

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The Library of Wales' Story anthologies feature the very best of Welsh short fiction, written amid the political, social and economic turbulence of twentieth century Wales. More than eighty outstanding works from the classics of Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies, Arthur Machen and Gwyn Thomas to the almost forgotten brilliance of Margiad Evans and Dilys Rowe and then forward to the prize-winning work of Emyr Humphreys, Rachel Trezise and Leonora Brito, colouring and engaging in the life of a changed country. Story II depicts a Wales facing-up to a dramatically changed culture and society in a world where the old certainties of class and money, love and war, of living and surviving do not hold. The writers explore the spirit of a country while the ground keeps shifting beneath them. In this selection Dai Smith has crafted an anthology that gives a unique insight into the life of a country: identity; language; class; sex are all are explored intensely in this kaleidoscope of the best of the last fifty years of Welsh short fiction.

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Snowdonia, 1880, and Jane Gruffydd is a newcomer to the district, dressed to the nines and almost fainting in the heat of the interminable prayer meeting out on the mountainside...In the pages of this classic 1936 novel, we see the passionate and headstrong Jane grow up and grow old, struggling to bring up a family of six children on the pittance earned by her slate-quarrying husband, Ifan. Spanning the next forty years, the novel traces the contours not only of one vividly evoked Welsh family but of a nation coming to self-consciousness; it begins in the heyday of Methodist fervour and ends in the carnage and disillusionment of the First World War. Through it all, Jane survives, the centre of her world and the inspiration for her children who will grow up determined to change the conditions of these poor people's lives, to release them forever from their chains.

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In the first and, arguably, the finest of Hilda Vaughan's ten novels the dawn of the twentieth century brings a new generation that clashes with the conservative traditionalism of an old Welsh way of life. Rhys Lloyd and his engagement with the ideas of Social Darwinism and the League of Nations make him a dangerous figure in the village. The son of a Welsh-speaking Nonconformist, his love for the church-going Esther reflects tensions that have long and bitterly divided the community. Most striking, however, is the stoic and determined Esther who calmly suffers the casual brutality of her agricultural upbringing, drawing on an inner strength and organic spirituality that would provide an archetype for Vaughan's later heroines. Despite a loving and sensitive depiction of her native Radnorshire landscape, Vaughan offers no rural idyll. "The Battle to the Weak" is a vividly drawn, socially engaged portrait of a small rural Welsh community with an awareness of its context within the wider world.

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The most legendary names in poetry from Wales - David Jones, Idris Davies, Vernon Watkins, RS Thomas, Dylan Thomas and Alun Lewis - are featured here alongside many living greats such as Dannie Abse, Tony Conran, Gillian Carke, Tony Curtis, Robert Minhinnick and Gwyneth Lewis. Every decade of the century is featured, as is almost every part of Wales - urban, industrial and rural - and many of the poems reflect our history from Edwardian times to the post-industrial present. Biographical notes are provided for all the poets. A few lesser names have been selected to suggest continuity and the changing literary scene over the century. Wales now has a rich, vibrant and varied literature in English and this anthology reflects it comprehensive, authoritative and lively way.

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My great grandfather and grandfather sailed the Horn, in steam and diesel, out of Liverpool. I was the first generation not to sail the Horn or fight a war. Instead, I would go to the end of the world, beyond Patagonia, to Tierra del Fuego. I would do more, I would see the Horn and find lost tribes. The child in me could go even further and sail the waters of Coleridge's albatross and enter the watercolours' blue horizons of my first novel, and sit on Robinson Crusoe's imaginary shore. I had imagined these places; they must exist. All I had to do was look for them.

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From the author of the celebrated Great War memoir

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A story of time slipping, desire just out of reach, like memories lost

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Bill Rees has been living in the south of France for ten years working as an itinerant bookseller in Montpellier. The one thing he misses about England is table tennis. Then he sees an advert to join a club for “experienced players only” and veterans. He starts training immediately, he’s forty and not as fit as he used to be but Bill Rees is returning to the game à la carte. Covering one Sunday tournament in the depths of Languedoc when his team bids to make the National Finals, Bill Rees produces a deeply felt and deeply funny homage to the beautiful game of ping-pong. Rees shows the sport for what it is: painful, exhilarating, tactical, fast (especially when his club mate Alain is at the table), consuming. All of which is revealed from the perspective of a Brit playing in French amateur leagues. Conveyed is the pain of competition, the agony of losing and the joys of victory. The reader is also regaled with a Zen-like insight into the sport. For all those athletes who dream of glory being around the corner and never too late. Contains illustrations by the Monpellier based artist Beachy.

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Cheval 9 contains a selection of the best work submitted this year to the Terry Hetherington Award, which has become known as one of the most significant awards for young writers in Wales.

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Cheval 7 presents a selection of the writing submitted by the talented young entrants to this year's Terry Hetherington Award, and includes new work by previous winners.Some of these writers are appearing in print for the first time; others have already begun to make their mark on the literary scene.

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A coming of age late tale as a jaded PR man seeks meaning and love in his life and addresses past, present and future along with a misfit cast of mystics, tramps, bar flies and copywriters.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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