My People

Caradoc Evans

The appearance of My People in 1915 caused a literary sensation. In England critics praised it as a work of art comparable with Zola and new writers such as Joyce …

Non-Return

Dai Vaughan

A hugely energetic rumination on politics, family and fiction, Non-Return traces the life of a technical draughtsman and writer, following his efforts to reconcile his art and his everyday life. Interspersed with exquisitely-written short fictions, this is a novel about fatherhood, work, memory, the disempowerment of the individual, and the significance of protest - most keenly explored in the death of the narrator’s wife, a resident of the Greenham Common peace camp ...

The Old and the Young

Margiad Evans

English literature has a fine tradition of rural writing, and one of this century’s greatest exponents was Margiad Evans (1909-1958). Although born in Uxbridge, she was brought up near Ross-on-Wye, and it is the south Herefordshire borderlands, its farmsteads, hamlets and towns, which are the setting for The Old And The Young, her collection of short stories first published in 1948 ...

Old People are a Problem

Emyr Humphreys

The western world is growing old and as the ’silver’ readership increases the octogenarian - though sprightly - Emyr Humphreys has written six long stories for and about the elderly. In these stories Humphreys explores change: political, social and physical, and its effects on the individual and society ...

Out of Nowhere

Roger Granelli

White British guitarist Frank Magnani arrives in fifties New York to break into the smoky world of jazz. Coming home from the austerity of post-war Europe to a land of plenty he finds there’s plenty to learn. His education is not confined to music alone, he also finds himself in a world where ego is everything, the musicians are black, and the drink and drugs the fuel of creativity ...

Outside the House of Baal

Emyr Humphreys

Spanning the twentieth century, Outside the House of Baal is the story of the conflict between public duty and personal love. In the course of a day J.T. Miles looks back over his life, a "Good Man" confronted by the choices of living. He is forced to contemplate the modern world (of which he feels no part) and his betrayal of his Welsh-speaking heritage ...

Overland

Richard Collins

Welcome to the happy-go-lucky world of 19-year-old Daniel Brownlow as he travels abroad after leaving school. Things ’just happen’ to Dan, a Seventies teenager with a blue Mohican and the nickname ’Madness’ ...

Pestilence

William Owen Roberts

From the elegance and refinement of Cairo’s Madrasa Academy sets out Salah Ibn al Khatib, whose mission is to avenge his wronged family by killing the King of France. In a bizarre and exotic journey the luckless Salah encounters whores and rogues, popes and priests, bishops, kings and queens. And as he penetrates the dark and Boschian heart of Europe something implacable and murderous accompanies him: pestilence ...

The Plum Tree

John Gwilym Jones

Published in 1946, Y Goeden Eirin was hailed as a masterly collection by one of the most accomplished exponents of the short story in the Welsh language. This new translation - The Plum Tree - makes the writing of John Gwilym Jones available to English-speaking readers for the first time. Intensely interested in how literature works, Jones produced engaging and accessible stories which bear comparison to Joyce and other modernists ...

Pumping up Napoleon

Maria Donovan

Pumping Up Napoleon is an assured collection of fifteen short stories with an offbeat take on human relationships, and the relationship of the rather unreliable human body to mind and spirit. ‘Offbeat’ includes dog massage, cloning your own four-foot son for organ transplants, and a university lecturer’s romance with a resurrected Napoleon Bonaparte…