Blog
20th November, 2023
Seren Fiction Christmas Gift Guide
Welcome to Seren’s Fiction Christmas Gift Guide, created to help you find the perfect gift for any fiction lover this festive season. This collection of novels and short story collections are bound to please any fiction fan. You can also browse our fiction pages to discover more great titles.
The Confessions of Hilary Durwood, Euron Griffith
Eager for glory as an explorer in the further reaches of the Empire Hilary Durwood is duped into undertaking a semi-mythical mission, in semi-mythical lands. After many adventures and setbacks he returns to Victorian London destitute, dismayed at having killed someone, and seeking revenge against the Gentleman Explorer who set him up. Meanwhile a serial killer, The Slasher, stalks the streets and inevitably their paths will cross…
This dark comedy thriller is a page-turning and riotous engagement with the notions and myths of Empire, the nature of reality, the power of narrative and the gullibility of those who wish to believe, even in the face of the truth.
The Green Bridge, John Davies
The short story has long been a popular form with writers and readers in Wales. The Green Bridge collects work by 25 of the country’s foremost writers of the twentieth century in an entertaining and varied anthology. Horror, satire, humour, war, tales of the aristocracy, of navvies, love, and madness, industry, the countryside, politics and sport: these stories provide insight into the changing values of Wales and the world. This is enjoyable reading for those who know Wales and its authors, and for newcomers to both.
Significance, Jo Mazelis
Lucy Swann is trying on a new life. She’s cut and dyed her hair and bought new clothes, but only gets as far as a small town in northern France when her flight is violently cut short. When Inspector Vivier and his assistant Sabine Pelat begin their investigation the chance encounters of her last days take on a new significance.
Lucy’s death, like a stone thrown into a pool, sends out far-reaching ripples, altering the lives of people who never knew her as well as those of her loved ones back home.
Things found on the mountain, Diana Powell
Farmer’s daughter Beth is a child of nature, utterly at one with the rugged landscape on which she tends the farm’s sheep, in a remote valley in the Black Mountains. But change is coming. The modern world arrives with the construction of a reservoir in a neighbouring valley. Part of the mountain is taken away to build the dam; there are people, machinery, noise. Then the farms are emptied of their young men by the First World War, including Beth’s beloved brother Daniel, who goes missing in action. Her mother turns to religion, her father falls silent. Things found on the mountain is a Hardyesque coming of age story. At its heart is the dramatic landscape, which, like Beth, suffers an end to innocence. This lyrically written novel, reminiscent of Sarah Hall, marks the arrival of an appealing new voice in fiction.
Scar Tissue, Clare Morgan
Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize
In a world of uncertainties, how do human beings navigate the increasingly complex interrelations of love, desire, home, community? Each story in Scar Tissue offers a fresh perspective on the nature of individual existence in all its transient vulnerability. The irreducibility of time acts as a continuo throughout the narratives and links loss with longing, hope with love and reveals the tentacular hold the past can have on all present aims and imperatives.
In these lyrical, evocative and searching stories, Scar Tissue unflinchingly explores the darker and more challenging aspects of emotional, sexual and familial relationships, while simultaneously celebrating the joys of being alive in an unfathomable world.
Whaling, Nathan Munday
1792. Nantucket whalers are invited to found the port of Milford Haven in Wales. What does the arrival of these hardy Quakers – immigrants to America a century before – mean for the local people? And what is the meaning of the beached whale that preceded them? Two cultures rub against each other and distrust grows, driven by the local preacher. As Whaling unfolds concern swerves into hysteria against the incomers and the preacher plans a grotesque, Jonah-inspired fate for the whalers.
Nathan Munday’s debut novel is an exciting mélange of original fiction, historical writing and whaling images. In it he explores our relationship with the natural world, the boundary between faith and superstition, and the age old problem of immigration. Set in historical fact this is a narrative at once modern and contemporaneous, the writing rich in imagery and deceptively tense as its story slides into allegory.
Darkness in the City of Light, Tony Curtis
Shortlisted for the Paul Torday Memorial Prize 2023
Paris is an extraordinary city, never more so than during the German occupation, with all the tensions, accommodations, resistances and paradoxes which that entailed. Civilised German officers engage in Parisian culture while their colleagues torture and kill in the city; French citizens measure what needs to be sacrificed in order to survive, or to be free. Morality is more sharply in focus than ever, and more expendable.
Stretching backwards and forwards within the twentieth century, and with a cast including Picasso, Braque, Sartre, Hemingway and Lee Miller, this remarkable multi-form novel combines fiction, journals, poetry and images to investigate what war can let loose, and how evil can dominate a man. Its collage technique reflects the continual shifts of life in the city of light.
This is Not Who We Are, Sophie Buchaillard
Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2023
1994, Iris and Victoria are pen friends. Iris writes about her life with her family in Paris. Victoria is in a refugee camp in Goma having fled the genocide in Rwanda in which thousands are being killed. One day Victoria’s letters stop, and Iris is told she has been moved.
For Victoria, the last twenty years have been ones of migration, to Goma, then to Paris and finally to London. There she starts a new life with her youngest brother Paul, and leaves the past behind. Or so she thinks until she is suddenly confronted with the decision to reconnect with her genocide-supporting middle brother Benjamin.
How have the lives of these two women, who shared a moment in time, changed in the past twenty years? As the pressure of long-kept family secrets builds, will they ever find each other?
Christmas in Wales, Dewi Roberts
Celebrate Christmas the Welsh way in the company of some of the country’s leading writers, past and present. Christmas mass, the nativity play, turkey and plum pudding, the Mari Lwyd, presents, the weather, the shopping and post-festive blues are among the many subjects drawn from stories, poems, diaries and letters. Featuring R.S. Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Dannie Abse, Gillian Clarke, Catherine Fisher, Bruce Chatwin, Sian James, Kate Roberts and Leslie Norris, it’s guaranteed to get you in the Christmas spirit.
