Tea in the Heather

Kate Roberts

Tea in the Heather is Kate Roberts’s classic tale of family and community in the hill-farms and slate quarries of Gwynedd. Beautifully realised, never idealised, it follows the life of Begw Gruffydd, the little girl who grows from the age of four to nine in the book....

There Was a Young Man From Cardiff

Dannie Abse

Poet, novelist, playwright, diaryist, anthologist and broadcaster, Dannie Abse has contributed hugely to literature in Britain. In There Was a Young Man From Cardiff he presents a series of deceptions - or are they? - which ask about the nature of ’truth’ and ’reality’ ...

Tide Race

Brenda Chamberlain

Tide-Race is a remarkable account of life on Bardsey (known as Ynys Enlli to Welsh speakers), a remote and mysterious island off the coast of North Wales. Brenda Chamberlain lived on the island from 1947 to 1961, during the last days of its hardy community. The combination of Bardsey, ancient site of Christian pilgrimage, wild and dangerous landscape, and Brenda Chamberlain, Royal Academy trained artist, results in a classic book, vividly illustrated by the author’s line drawings ...

To Babel and Back

Robert Minhinnick

WINNER OF WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2006

Join Robert Minhinnick on a journey across a radioactive planet. Researching the use of depleted uranium in modern weapons, the writer follows a deadly trail from the uranium mines of the USA into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq...

Totes Meer

Dai Vaughan

Totes Meer is an eloquent and lapidary meditation on control, rebellion and creativity. In four sections - ’A Rabbit’, ’Letter to a Dog’, ’In Chrysalis’, ’Slug Heaven’ - Dai Vaughan contrasts life viewed in anticipation with life viewed in retrospect ...

A Toy Epic

Emyr Humphreys

A Toy Epic is the story of three boys moving towards the threshold of adult life in the Thirties. From differing backgrounds, their lives cross and touch until they become firm friends. Each of them, Michael, Albie and Iorwerth, take up the story in turn, creating their own particular world and contributing to the composite picture of ’one of the four comers of Wales’ ...

Unconditional Surrender

Emyr Humphreys


In the months between May and August 1945 the world is both winding down and changing forever. The European war over, Britain looks to the future and prepares for a general election. Unknown to all but a few, life is about to be pitched into the atomic age ...

Who Stole a Bloater?

Frances Thomas

Meet the Vaughan family: Mamma, Dadda, Davy, his five sisters and baby brother Owen. They live in a small house in a Welsh Valley before the First World War. This charming book chronicles some of their adventures: Bessie’s hunger strike for the latest fashion; Owen’s sudden and mysterious disappearance; Davy’s trip to the colliery to see the pit ponies ...

Wishdaughter

Adrian Mourby

Set in contemporary Venice, Tel Aviv, Munich, London and rural Wales, Adrian Mourby’s new novel is a compelling examination of paternity, genius and the potency of the written word. The chance discovery of a letter sets journalist Bill Wheeler off on an investigation into the dark world of Richard Wagner, opera’s greatest composer and the man whom Nietszche described as a ’sickness’ ...

The Woman who Loved an Octopus and other Saint’s Tales

Imogen Rhia Herrad

From the sensuous sea to flight from the world, The Woman who Loved an Octopus is an inspired collection of twelve themed short stories, based on the lives and legends of thirteen Celtic women saints from the first millennium …

“Forget the airbrushed, perma-tanned, size zero saccharine celebrity ‘role models’ gracing the covers of all the glossy magazines today. Imogen Herrad has delved back to tales to Celtic Saints of the fifth and sixth centuries to find some real women to look up to … It is when Herrad transposes her tales to the contemporary world that the full force of her talent becomes apparent … we find that sometimes Herrad roars and sometimes she has a quiet word in your ear, but mostly, as with good music, she sounds better with the volume turned up to eleven”.

Susie Wild, New Welsh Review, December 07