Real Wrexham

“Sometimes I read something and it seems to be so ‘right’ it is beautiful – and that is how this short passage seems to me… Grahame Davies is an accomplished poet, journalist and critic and is also fascinated by his home town – and it shows. This book; which seems to me to be part history, part travelogue and part memoir, seems to be the ideal merging of his talents.” – Clare Dudman, keeperofthesnails.blogspot.com

Wrexham: the Eastern Front of Wales. The place where the tide of Saxon invasion rolled in, hit the mountains and stopped. The place where Owain Glyndŵr came to get married, where Elihu Yale came to be buried, and where the giants of English football come to be killed.

This is a border town where landscapes, accents and identities meet, mingle and merge. A place where mountain meets plain, Wales meets England, and the Mabinogion meets Man United.

The biggest town in north Wales gets the  ‘Real’ treatment from novelist and poet Grahame Davies. Born in Coedpoeth, now much-travelled, he’s still endlessly fascinated by his home town.

Mixing personal experience and memory with history, topography, journalism, and an unflagging interest, Davies looks beyond the town’s workaday image and finds something rather special.

Real Wrexham’s real-life characters include obsessive football fans, an ill-fated racing driver, a soccer-player-turned-TV-psychic, several hard-drinking priests, two high-society lesbians and a werewolf. Among the subject it features are a mysterious massacre, a mining disaster, a tour of Wrexham’s ‘Wild West’ and a guide to ‘Parallel Wrexhams’ worldwide. Even if you thought you knew Wrexham, this book will make you think again.

The history, communal and personal, which it uncovers is a revelation. It’s a masterpiece of psychogeography.

Real Series Editor: Peter Finch