Current Books

Posted on by

John Llewellyn Rhys Prize ‘Suspended’

Sponsors of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, Booktrust, suffered severe funding cuts, which has resulted in the suspension of the popular prize.

The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize is a literary prize and was created to award authors from the Commonwealth under the age of 35.

Jane Oliver initiated the prize for the her husband, John Llewellyn Rhys, a writer who died tragically young, serving in the RAF in 1940.

“The John Llewellyn Rhys prize is one of the most romantic and distinguished of prizes and its disappearance would be a great loss to hopeful authors and he literary world” says Margaret Drabble former John Llewellyn Rhys prize winner.

Booktrust state that they did not take the decision lightly, and they strongly intend to bring back the Prize with a bang in the very near future.

Previous winners of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize:

2010 – Amy Sackville The Still Point
2009 – Evie Wyld After the Fire, A Still Small Voice
2008 – Henry Hitchings The Secret Life of Words
2006/7 – Sarah Hall The Carhullan Army
2005 – Uzodinma Iweala Beasts of No Nation
2004 – Jonathan Trigell Boy A
2003 – Charlotte Mendelson Daughters of Jerusalem
2002 Mary Laven Virgins of Venice
2001 – Susanna Jones The Earthquake Bird
2000 – Edward Platt Leadville

We hope to see the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize return very soon.

Posted on by

‘The Last Hundred Days’

Released 1st June 2011 by Patrick McGuinness.

An intricately plotted literary thriller about Ceausescus last hundred days in power, from an author who was a first-hand witness to the regime.

Set during Ceausescu’s last hundred days in power, Patrick McGuinness’s accomplished debut novel explores a world of danger, repression and corruption.

When our narrator, a young English student with a damaged past and an uncertain future, arrives in Bucharest he finds himself in a job he never applied for. With duties that become increasingly ambiguous and precarious, he soon finds himself uncomfortably and often dangerously close to the eye of the storm. He learns, as he goes, the uncertainty of friendships in a surveillance society: friendships that are compromised and riddled with danger and duplicity. He encounters dissidents, party apparatchiks, black-markerteers, diplomats, spies and ordinary Romanians, their lives all intertwined against a background of severe poverty and repression as Europe’s most paranoid regime plays out its bloody endgame.

The socialist state is in stasis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceaucescu’s demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows.

Posted on by

‘Daniel’s Beetles’

Released 16th May 2011 by Tony Bianchi.

Daniel’s Beetles is the author’s translation of his prizewinning novel, Pryfeta

Daniel is six. One afternoon, while playing with insects in the garden, he sees his father fall to his death. Is he upset? It’s difficult to say, because Daniel would prefer to attend to his beetles. Forty years later, he remembers nothing of the event. But two failed relationships and his elderly mother’s confusion  bring Daniel face-to-face with his demons. Then he meets Cerys and Dr Bruno and discovers a bold new way of regaining control over the past.

Daniel’s Beetles is an absorbing, unnerving novel about memory and forgetting, stories and lies. It describes our attempts to recreate ourselves in ways we can never fully control. And in Dr Bruno, it offers a disturbing glimpse of how our fears and desires can be manipulated by much larger forces.

Tony Bianchi is from North Shields, Northumberland and lives in Cardiff. The Welsh-language version of Daniel’s Beetles won the Daniel Owen Prize in 2007 and was short-listed for Wales Book of the Year. He has published two other novels in Welsh – Esgyrn Bach (2006) and Chwilio am Sebastian Pierce (2009) – and a volume of short stories, Cyffesion Geordie Oddi Cartref (2010). His English-language novel, Bumping (2010), was long-listed for the Portico Prize in 2010. He has also won awards for his poetry in Welsh.

‘One of the most exciting writers working in Wales today.’ (Lloyd Jones, Taliesin)

‘This is an intricate and multi-layered novel, rich in ideas and eloquent in expression, which will be pored over for years to come.’ (Owain Wilkins, Planet)

‘The writing is muscular and at times utterly overwhelming… I was exhilarated.’
(Robat Arwyn, adjudicator, National Eisteddfod of Wales)

 

Posted on by

‘Real South Pembrokeshire’

The latest release in The Real Series.
Released 13th June 2011 by Tony Curtis.

Poet, and past resident and frequent visitor Tony Curtis roams south Pembrokeshire, from costal resorts of Tenby and Saundersfoot, west to the surfers of Stackpole and Barafundle and north to the Landsker, the cultural boundary between English speaking south Pembs and the Welsh speaking north. On his tour round half-county Curtis takes in many contrasts, from Pembrokshire’s famous new potatoes to the oil refineries of Angle, from farmworkers to immigrant artists, from the excited tourism of Folly Farm and Oakwood Park to the tranquillity of Bosherston Ponds and timeless beauty of Broadhaven beach.

In keeping with the series Curtis views his area through the eyes of a local and as a visitor, digging into his own Pembrokeshire backstory – and deeper into its history- but also observing keenly the Pembrokeshire of the new century. The mix of new and old, of memoir, anecdote and history gives us new insights into patters and the vivacity of life in one of the most beautiful places in Britain.

Posted on by

‘Real Bloomsbury’

Published 15th November 2010 by Nicholas Murray.

“His (Murray) amiably informative and well-illustrated book is the ideal companion to any tour.” 
The Independent

Birthplace of Christian Socialism. Site of the British Museum, University College, RADA, the Friends House, the BMA, Great Ormond Street Hospital. Bloomsbury is crammed with history and with contemporary decision-making. But there is also working class Bloomsbury and, now, Bengali Bloomsbury in the east.

Biographer and novelist Nicholas Murray walks this crowded square mile or so, among the locals, the students, the tourists, alone or in the company of local characters, to give Bloomsbury the ‘Real’ series treatment of history, memoir, ‘psychogeography’ and oblique approaches to the familiar. His entertaining and informative text is accompanied by equally oblique images, the sort you won’t find in either tourist guides or regular history books. All of which present Bloomsbury as it’s never been portrayed before: intimate, contemporary, exploratory and occasionally downright strange.

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch
www.bibliophilicblogger.blogspot.com

Posted on by

‘Real Llanelli’

Published 3rd December 2009 by Jon Gower.

Llanelli stands on several borders in Wales. Industrial town, or still belonging to its rural Carmarthenshire hinterland? Welsh or Englishspeaking? Plaid or Labour? Shaped by its workers or by the small number of families who employed them? It all makes Llanelli that much more interesting than a town of its size has any right to be.

Jon Gower has written a lively and engaging account of Llanelli and its environs, from how to pronounce ‘Llanelli’ to how a village in rural Carmarthenshire became a European centre for iron, steel and tinplate. He examines this industrial heritage but also its residue today, hitching a lift on the delivery of Llanelli-manufactured widgets to a manufacturer in Germany. He charts the industrial decline and transformation into leisure, particularly sport (Stradey or Parc y Scarlets?) beer and the environment. Then there’s the nearby cockling, farming inland and the leisure/ ecological development of the coastal path and park.

Shaped by and shaping all these things are the people: steelworkers, farmers, professional and amateur sportsmen, artists and writers, the small local bourgeoisie, the famous who may have left the town but still carry a part of it in them.The Llanelli identity may be complex but it is embraced by an almost tribal people.

Broadcaster, journalist and writer Jon Gower proves well- equipped to explore Llanelli and its culture in both languages in an entertaining book full of fresh insights and fascinating stories. From Burry Port to Trimsaran it’s all there.

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch

Posted on by

‘Real Cardiff Three’

Published 26th November 2009 by Peter Finch.

Since Peter Finch began his capital trilogy in 2002, Cardiff has changed enormously. In Real Cardiff Three Finch checks out the new, from Torchwood to St David’s 2, while continuing his authorial dig, revealing the places and people who make the city what it is.

En route he looks across Cardiff from its tallest buildings, seeks out subterranean passages, spends a day at Ely race course, storms Treoda Castle (if only he could find it), discovers the secret life of Whitchurch hospital and takes his geiger counter to atomic Cardiff. Full of pathos and comedy, nostalgia and blistering contemporary commentary, this volume is sure to become as popular as Real Cardiff and Real Cardiff Two.

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch

Posted on by

‘Real Liverpool’

Published 1st January 2009 by Niall Griffiths.

In population terms, Liverpool isn’t a huge city (it is dwarfed by Birmingham), but it looms colossally in the history (recorded and mythical) of the British Isles, and indeed the world. Real Liverpoolis Niall Griffiths’ antidote to some of mawkish twaddle that has marked Liverpool’s year as European City of Culture. Griffiths’ love/hate relationship with the city of his birth is central to the book. He explores the various facets of the city – its maritime and merchant histories, class divisions, sectarian divides, Celtic influences, and the siege mentality underpinning the celebrated Scouse humour. Nor does he flinch from Liverpool’s dark side: the money from the slave trade, the drugs, the urban blight, the fallout from Thatcherism, the internecine violence. Jamie Bulger, Heysel, Hillsborough, the Dockers’ Strike, the Toxteth Riots, all of these and more are discussed.Real Liverpoolis underpinned by a strong autobiographical element which details the author’s birth and formative years in the city, his movement away from it, the abiding pull it exerts. In addition, Griffiths interviews many people connected closely to the city, from personal friends and family members to artists and workers. From the Wirral to Warrington, Anfield to Everton, Bootle to Diddyland, Griffiths criss-crosses Liverpool by the Ferry and through the Tunnels, from John Lennon airport to the racecourse and down the docks, building a picture of a city which, whatever its faults, is never dull.’Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch
Posted on by

‘Real Wales’

Published on 1st January 2009 by Peter Finch.

In this ambitious offering from the Real… series, following acclaim for Real Cardiff and Real Cardiff Two, Finch takes on the alien land he didn’t know was his, until he grew and went to see it: Real Wales. A cotton-wool nation, full of football and big-brother slim-screen television, or a land of demons, where white robed druids would wail at you through a never ending mist?

In muscular, syncopated and witty prose, Finch presents 30 years of journeys through the familiar, the bizarre, and to all those places on the TV weather map he never before had cause to visit.

In a country of small and scattered populations, who are all certain of who they are, and where doubt is a quality none possess, Finch comes across poetry in Merthyr, an abandoned castle in Dinas Powys, UFOs and Waldo Williams in West Wales, Jack Kerouac on the beach at Gwbert, the military at Epynt, bizarre sports in Llanwrtyd, flying gravy in Cricieth, panic on Snowdon, and a stripper at the Royal Welsh.

Whether reading a mountain as Braille or clearing a tent at Hay with one poem, Finch seeks to embrace the permanently stern independence of spirit he sees across the country. Personal but never pedestrian, in a country where the past is so near the surface but can never quite be picked up, he accompanies oddballs and novelists, historians and local experts, to find something usually forgotten in a world of oil-powered multi-national commercial empires and federal enormity: Small is beautiful.

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch

Posted on by

‘Real Merthyr’

Published 1st November 2008 by Mario Basini.

About Mario Basini
Mario Basini is a journalist and columnist with the Western Mail. He writes and broadcasts on a wide range of subjects and has presented programmes on BBC Wales, BBC Radio Wales and Radio 5 .

About Real Merthyr
Merthyr Tydfil, seldom can a town of 55,000 people have had such a long and such a varied history. Named after the slaughter of Tudful, daughter of the Prince of Brycheiniog in a time before history was written, site of a Roman fort (at Penydarren, now under the football ground), site of a Norman castle (at Morlais), the epicentre of the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire, a byword for socialism and republicanism, then a byword for the post-industrial south Wales valleys: iron, steel, coal closures, high unemployment, inward investment from Japan.

Present day Merthyr is the result of the industrial revolution (which threw up another martyr: Dic Penderyn) which set the tone of the town in the form of varying degrees of deprivation meant to be ameliorated by fine Victorian buildings paid for by the local ironmasters. Its people (from all over Wales, England, Europe) took on a political mindset which is beginning to change only now. Indeed, Merthyr is beginning to change in many ways, perhaps now shrugging off the weight of its history.

Native Merthyrman Mario Basini gives the town the ‘Real’ treatment, mixing history, myth and personal experience to produce a new, sometimes astounding, view of a place at once representative of south Wales and carving out a new identity for itself. From Dowlais Top and the ironworks to Pennydarren Park, from Lady Charlotte Guest to Johnny Owen, from the Gurnos to the cholera cemetery and from Vaynor Church and the Crawshays to the salami and steamed pies of Basini’s Café, this is an enthralling guide to one of the most important small towns of Britain.

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch