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 and beyond.
Travel to the revolutionary closing years of 18th century England. Meet Jack Cockshutt, arsonist by trade, returning to rescue his victims and profit from their relief, finding the woman who just might save him. Meet the beauty who castigates her customers with passages from Paine's Rights of Man; the boy who raises the tricolour on the White Tower; the labourer contracted to spend seven years locked up beneath a dilettante's country house. Meet Lappish women. Glimpse the picnic party of the Ottoman ambassador.A stunning new voice emerges with these strange and gemlike stories.
Never before published, written 'at white-heat in three weeks' in autumn 1967 after two visits to the detention island of Leros in the Greek Dodecanese, The Protagonists is Chamberlain's response to the right-wing Colonels' Coup of April 1967.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22ND, 1963, DALLAS, TEXAS, 12.30PM.The US President, John F Kennedy, is assassinated as his motorcade hits town, watched by crowds of spectators and the world s media. Watching too from the grassy knoll nearby is a young mother who, in the confusion, lets go of her daughter's hand. When she turns around the little girl has vanished. Fifty years later, when everyone remembers what they were doing at that moment in history, she is still missing. Who will remember her?Local hack Gary Blanchet, inspired by the mother's story, joins forces with former police psychic Lydia Collins to seek answers. Risking ridicule for their controversial theories and with a classroom shooting close to home to deal with, they re-examine the evidence from that day, study footage and look at the official report for details of witnesses in the JFK case. But this time they re not looking for a man in a crowd with a gun; they are looking for little Eleanor Boone.Gone, while no one was watching? Maybe someone was.
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.
William Henry Davies was born in a pub and learnt early in life to rely on his wits and his fists and to drink. Around the turn of the century, when he was twenty-two, his restless spirit of adventure led him to set off for America, and he worked around the country taking casual jobs where he could, thieving and begging where he couldn't. His experiences were richly coloured by the bullies, tricksters, and fellow-adventurers he encountered New Haven Baldy, Wee Shorty, The Indian Kid, and English Harry, to name but a few. He was thrown into prison in Michigan, beaten up in New Orleans, witnessed a lynching in Tennessee, and got drunk pretty well everywhere. A harrowing accident forced him to return to England and the seedy world of doss-houses and down-and-outs like Boozy Bob and Irish Tim.When George Bernard Shaw first read the Autobiography in manuscript, he was stunned by the raw power of its unvarnished narrative. It was his enthusiasm, expressed in the Preface, that ensured the initial success of a book now regarded as a classic.
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.
Meet the prostitute who gets the better of her brothers when they try to marry her off, the wife who is absolved of adultery, the hero who drowns in a bowser of cheap beer, the poetry slammer who doesn't get to perform his final poem, and many more.
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.
Between Two Rivers is an honest, funny and moving memoir of Baghdad life from the perspective of a young woman from England, transplanted into another culture by love and family. Dorothy is eighteen when she meets a dark, mysterious stranger at a dance in Portsmouth. Zane is a student from Iraq studying engineering. Almost before she realises, they are married, her husband has finished his course and Dorothy has a three month old daughter called Summer. They borrow a Mercedes from Zane's brother in Germany and begin the drive to Baghdad. Zane doesn't have a licence or insurance for the car and Dorothy doesn't have a visa for Iraq. Zane has only just told his family he is married. They arrive in Baghdad to live with his parents, sisters and brothers in a house in the suburbs. Zane has to find a job in a country where everything is changing. Dorothy has to learn Arabic and help entertain a stream of visitors, all eager to meet the imported new bride. She is soon pregnant again. Life in in the east is not going to be as she expected, letters take weeks to arrive from home and her mother is convinced she is never going to see her daughter again... The book follows twenty years of love, adjustment and adventure for Dorothy Al Khafaji.
These poems of desire, loss and revenge explore lives caught in the gravity of their own orbit. Haunting, distinctive and sensual, debut poetry collection The Shape of a Forest has unblinking scope. This sophisticated debut collection moves from the historical to the contemporary: Genghis Kahn surveys his territory whilst Amelia Earhart disappears to myth. The Belvedere Apollo is dug up heralding the onset of The Renaissance as a tiger meets a foe in a Siberian Forest, the Pendle witches are hung in Lancashire, and in tsunami-struck Japanese gardens, South Sea islands and New York hotel rooms, lives are loosened like milk teeth. The Shape of a Forest is a powerful survey of life and of human experience that spans centuries and the continents.
As the newly-built foundries of South Wales enter their first decline, a travelling harpist from the rural north arrives in town to find his friends caught in a fiercly-fought industrial dispute, a dispute which quickly spirals out of control.
Dannie Abse's rich mixture of Welsh and Jewish backgrounds, and his dual occupations of doctor and author, have led to what is widely regarded as one of the most readable, humorous and poignant autobiographies since the war.
Imagine a life of adventure, set in the world of second-hand books: finding a valuable first edition gathering dust on a Parisian pub shelf, opening bookshops in Montpellier, Paris, Bangor, trading books with a holidaying Ian McEwan or Alan Sillitoe, and running for the door after finding yourself trespassing in a wealthy Moroccan's private library...The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner recounts the trials, joys and tribulations of selling second hand books. Full of quirky anecdotes and literary odds and ends, these unique insider's tales of the trade are sure to spark the imagination of every book- lover who picks it up.
A classic selection of the best of Stan Barstow's stories covering the last five decades of British life. A group of young tearaways on a night out that begins with horse-play and ends in tragedy; the loneliness of a drunken miner's wife; a war-shocked ex-sailor forced beyond endurance, a widower is brought to grief by a woman outside his real understanding, a factory worker finding his way through the physical world of his marriage real and involving, Barstow's stories are urgent slices of life, men and women struggling and succeeding to come to terms with The Likes of Us.
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.
Winner of the Best First Book Award at Zimbabwe International Book Fair 2010. Ellie is a shy girl growing up in post-Independence Zimbabwe, longing for escape from the confines of small-town life. When she eventually moves to Britain, her wish seems to have come true. But life there is not all she imagined.
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.Into Suez is a compelling human and political drama, set in the postwar period when Britain, the bankrupt victor of the Second World War, attempted to assert itself as an Imperial power in a world wholly altered. The novel is set in the run-up to the Suez Crisis, a template for future invasions (Iraq and Afghanistan being the most recent).In this moving story, Joe's tragedy is that of an ordinary working man of his generation: he's a lovely, humorous, emotional man in whom the common ration of racism and misogyny becomes a painful sickness. Ailsa, intelligent, curious and craving to explore the realities of the Egypt she enters, meets on the voyage out Mona, a Palestinian woman who excites in her yearning for a world beyond her horizons. When Joe's closest friend is murdered by Egyptian terrorists, their relationship spirals towards tragedy. Through it all, love remains.Looking back in old age, their daughter Nia follows in their wake to sail the Suez Canal with the aged Mona. Nia has been told her father was a war hero: now she will face a more painful truth.
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.
A forced wedding in a freezing country church, where the only sound is the bride's tears: so starts Mary Bicknor's life of misery with brutish Easter Probert, groom to the oddly assorted Kilminster family. In a tale of passion, violence, cruelty and unexpected tenderness, Margiad Evans conjures a tempestous and sometimes sinister world of rural and small-town border life in the early twentieth century.
With a foreword by Phillip Pullman, Make Room for the Jester is a haunting journey from the edge of childhood into a threatening adult world.Lew Morgan and Gladstone Williams are two friends trying to make sense of their lives over a long hot summer in the north Wales seaside town of Porthmawr. It will be a summer that changes everything. When the charming but drunk Ashton Vaughan returns home to Porthmawr the primeval swamp of respectability he triggers a chain reaction of ruin, disillusion and death which keeps the whole town bubbling for most of the summer. There's fraud, farce, drama, drunkenness, temperance, hysteria and tragedy. This Welsh take on The Catcher in the Rye is a remarkable and welcome rediscovery.
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.
Twelve-ish. Shade in the Murillo gardens, as satisfying as lemonade. In the heat, just for a moment, Miguel stood in front of me. The old Miguel, not the one we've got now. The fuzzy image held its hand out and led me to the old Arab wall.When we were first married, we tried to climb it in the middle of the night. A celebration. 'This wall's been here hundreds of years,' Miguel said. 'If we can conquer that, we can conquer anything.' I believed him.I open my eyes and he's gone.In these slippery stories the truth and the possible weave as unexpected lives, complicated minds and exotic spaces are sketched in with nimble words and quick wit. Ghosts torment from the past; future selves write back; the lost look about, find themselves watched, are lead astray.Keep company with thieves and murdering artists, with the couple who miss the ferry for their make-or-break holiday; the mayonnaise deliveryman who becomes a reluctant golddigger, and the psychoanalyst and his GP wife investigate a local widow's naked appearances in church.Between these pages you can never be sure quite who you'll meet next, but you can be sure that you're in safe hands. An intriguing new collection from a writer you'll want to keep an eye on.
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.
Winner of the PEN International/New Voices Award 2015Shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2015Onstage again, you stare down at your feet, imagining you see the bright, painted curves of a pair of clown's shoes... It helps to pretend you are a clown, hidden inside baggy trousers, your true face invisible behind splashes of red lipstick and pale powder...A dazzling, ambitious debut collection from a young talent, these critically acclaimed stories dip into the shadows and spotlights of life. From the pale waking hours to the darkling places, Clown's Shoes introduces a cast of lost characters trying to find their way, and asking whether everyone really does come salting home in the end?Since the Devil visited the glove maker, she has found herself in the asylum counting out days instead of stitches. At the dog track, hidden amongst the rowdy punters, a woman bets on underdogs, life, and love. Onstage, a desperate mother performs a nightly striptease, whilst, in a small Welsh town, a young Korean immigrant tells her secrets to the sway of the sea.The people who populate the exciting and intriguing world of Clown's Shoes have stories that enthrall the imagination.
All The Places We Lived is a collection of disparate, yet inextricably connected stories that are bound by the common threads that exist amongst young people in and out of love with each other and life in the twenty-first century.
Isabel Williams (Is for short) is something of a challenge, even for her best friend Robert. As a new girl at a 1970s comprehensive she seems vulnerable, but she soon starts putting her teachers in their place with her amazing knowledge of science, bridges and the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Robert soon finds himself dodging school to visit antiquated lift shafts and getting lost in the science museum in a bid to keep up with his mercurial fellow pupil, who at times actually appears to believe she is Bunel reincarnated. But then, after a showdown in school - over Brunel - Is goes missing and only Robert sets knows where she could have gone...This new children's novel by Derek Webb aims to engage girls in particular with science and engineering, as well as introducing younger readers to Key Stage 2 science principles, and the history of Brunel, while at the same time offering them a fun and adventurous read.
Shortlisted for the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize.Lola and Pijin make up stories to test each other, stories of daring and adventure, of bad people and of Gwyn who drives his ice-cream up the hill to their town every week. Gwyn is a dangerous man and Pijin knows it. Lola is not so sure. As they grow up and their friendship grows more complicated, some of their stories fall silent, but some will come true.Pigeon is a journey through the uneasy half-forgotten memories of childhood, a story about wishful-thinking and the power of language.
Beautiful widow Joan D'Silva is at Howrah Station, fleeing Calcutta with her 11-year-old son Errol. Also on the same train is Laxhimi, a notorious hijira prostitute: charismatic, sensual and powerful. They are both running away to Lucknow to escape danger, but soon their lives will become entangled in a web of corruption and blackmail.
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