9th December, 2010

EXCLUSIVE to Seren: New Stories from the Mabinogion Series – Limited Availability

Signed Copies exclusive to Seren – Buy all four books for £30 (£24, if you join our online bookclub)
A woman made of flowers, secrets, murder and revenge, spaceships, giants, war games, romance, surfing and horse-riding home down the M4.
This autumn saw Seren launch two new titles in its much-praised New Stories from the Mabinogion series. Now we are offering readers the chance to buy a limited edition set of signed copies of all the four novellas in the series to date, at a specially reduced price of £30.00.
The series launched last year with The Ninth Wave by Russell Celyn Jones and White Ravens by Owen Sheers, and continued in 2010 with two excellent new titles: The Meat Tree by Gwyneth Lewis and The Dreams of Max and Ronnie by Niall Griffiths.
New Stories from the Mabinogion gives leading Welsh authors the chance to retell these medieval stories of Celtic mythology and Arthurian Britain in entirely their own way, creating fresh, contemporary novellas while keeping the old tales at the heart of the new. The results so far have been an excellent collection of diverse and dynamic stories from writers at the height of their powers.
The Ninth Wave by Russell Celyn Jones takes the story of young Welsh ruler ‘Pwyll, Lord of Dyfed’ and mixes it with elements of our own Prince Harry, to come up with this meditation on leadership and loss. Set in a bizarre, post-oil world of the near future the story swops the magical for the psychological and the courtly for the post-feminist to create a fascinating retelling of this first branch of the Mabinogion in which Pwll has to swop beds with the Lord of the Underworld, kill his future wife’s fiancé and deal with the loss of his own child.
Based on the second branch of the Mabinogion, ‘Branwen, daughter of Llyr’, Owen Sheers’ White Ravens offers the reader two stories across two different times, with the thread of an ancient tale running through the lives of twenty-first century farmer’s daughter Rhian and the mysterious Branwen…
Wounded in Italy, Matthew O’Connell is seeing out WWII in a secret government department. But then he’s given the bizarre task of escorting a box containing six raven chicks from a remote hill farm in Wales to the Tower of London and he becomes part of a story over which he seems to have no control.
Desire, DNA, incest, bestiality, revenge, shape-shifting and flowers – Gwyneth Lewis’ The Meat Tree, based on the story of ‘Blodeuwedd’ in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, could be said to have it all. In Lewis’ hands this tale becomes a thrilling and subtle whodunit set on board an ancient spaceship. For the first time in centuries readers get Blodeuwedd’s take on the story as she becomes human at the whim of two male magicians. And after all… what man has any idea how sap burns in the veins of a woman?
There’s war and carnage in The Dreams of Max and Ronnie, and Iraq-bound squaddie Ronnie is out with his mates ‘forgetting what has yet to happen’. Their revelries take them to the ‘filthy hovel’ of Red Helen, where Ronnie takes something dodgy and falls asleep to dream of the tattooed tribes of modern Britain surrounding a grinning man playing war games.
This radical retelling of ‘Rhonabwy’s Dream’, is combined with an equally lively account of ‘The Dream of Maxen Wledig’, set in a Cardiff nightclub called Rome. Told with his customary skill and vigour, Griffiths’ retellings revitalise ancient satire into a biting commentary on leadership, conflict and the divisions in British society.