Kate Rivers has it all; London life, successful acting career, and caring lover Paul. So why, when she is unexpectedly recalled to the Welsh village where she grew up, are both her past and her present such a struggle to come to terms with? Where is Paul when she needs him, and why does her handsome cousin Rhydian seem to feature so much in both her memory and her present dilemma? First Published in 2000, this classic tale is told with skill and sympathy by novelist Sian James.
book
Forthcoming Title: ‘Writing King Kong’
To be released on 20th June 2011.
Author:
Writing King Kong explores the way we write the world, and reinvent it both for our own development and delusion. From an elliptical self-help manual to a telephone party line where we become ‘an accidental spy’ on another life, from the ambivalent comfort of a drunken night singing hymns to the elusive proximity of family trees, the recipe for summer pudding as elegy for a lost friend or a mantra of engineering facts (‘six million hand-driven rivets’) about Sydney Harbour Bridge to comfort a dying father. Along with King Kong, Anton Chekhov, Marilyn Monroe and Shakespeare’s comic lovers, the likes of Gershwin, Robinson Crusoe, Ulysses, Fred and Ginger also find their way into this eclectic, multi-voiced collection. At the heart of the book is a sequence of poems inspired by the writer’s travels in South America, conjuring both the exactitude of place and the strange unreality of journeying.
“His poems can remind us how complex a business it is to recall and rebuild a world, and how the act of doing so comes bundled with its own sense of loss” – Paul Farley, Poery London
‘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.
‘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)
‘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.
‘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
Nicholas Murray
Nicholas Murray is a biographer, poet, novelist and critic. The author of acclaimed biographies of Matthew Arnold, Andrew Marvell, Aldous Huxley and Franz Kafka, he is also the Royal Literary Fund Writer for Queen Mary College University of London. Visit his website at www.nicholasmurray.co.uk
Books by Nicholas Murray
A Short Book About Love
Real Bloomsbury
Remembering Carmen
‘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
Jon Gower
Jon Gower is a producer with Boomerang, one of Wales’ most dynamically creative TV and radio companies. He was BBC Wales’ Arts and Media correspondent from 2000-2006, when he also presented First Hand, BBC Radio Wales’ arts programme. Jon has also worked, variously, as public affairs officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and as a current affairs journalist for HTV. He has written books about travel and local history, including An Island Called Smith (Gomer, 2001), about a disappearing island in Chesapeake Bay, which was a John Morgan Award winner. He has edited a further four volumes, as well as writing a collection of short stories, Big Fish (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2000).
Jon is currently working on a critical biography of the American actor Steve Buscemi and has recently published a book about his home town, Llanelli, for Seren’s ‘Real Wales’ series. He is an English language judge for the 2011 Wales Book of the Year.
Books by Jon Gower
Real Llanelli
‘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
