Welcome to Seren’s Non-Fiction Christmas Gift Guide. Find the perfect gift for avid fans of memoir, essays, the great outdoors and much more. Browse our specially selected titles below, or visit our non-fiction pages for more inspiration.
Are You Judging Me Yet?, Kim Moore
In Are You Judging Me Yet? Kim Moore explores the relationship between poetry and everyday sexism, in a series of lyrical essays. They draw on her experience of writing and performing the poems in her Forward Prize-winning collection All The Men I Never Married to examine the dynamics of being a female poet performing in a public space.
Are You Judging Me Yet? is designed to encourage readers to make their own connections between the essays. Each chapter ends with a choice of sections to read next, as well as connecting the essays to poems from All The Men I Never Married.
Welsh Quilts, Jen Jones
Jen Jones has written an expanded version of Welsh Quilts, her authoritative guide to the history and art of the quilt in Wales. Kaffe Fassett, the doyenne of textiles, provides a Foreword for this new edition, which also includes a greater number of images of quilt designs – some published for the first time – in a beautifully produced, detailed and generously illustrated book. Welsh Quilts explores the origins of quilting and blanket making in Wales before considering its peak period between 1870 and the Second World War when wholecloth, frame-made quilts became the standard for which the country was famous.
The Edge of Cymru: A Journey, Julie Brominicks
The Edge of Cymru is the story of Julie Brominicks’ walk around Wales in the course of a year. As an educator she knew a lot about the country’s natural resources. But as a long established incomer from England and more recent Welsh learner, she wanted to know more about its history, about Wales today, and her place in it.
Brominicksʼ observations of the places and people she meets on her journey make a fascinating alternative travelogue about Wales and the lives its people live. Her writing is lyrical, with engaging and striking coinages and images which carry the reader along too, entertained and informed. A quest of personal discovery, the narrative of The Edge of Cymru is also a refreshingly different way of looking at place, identity, memory and belonging.
Bar 44: Tapas y Copas , Owen and Tom Morgan
Bar 44: Tapas y Copas celebrates Spanish food and drink in equal measure. These delicious recipes – each tried and tested in the busy Bar 44 restaurants – elevate traditional Spanish cuisine to exciting new heights with dishes which look good and taste even better.
Bask in the passion of two of the most knowledgeable people celebrating modern Spanish food, drink and culture in the UK. More than just a cookbook, Bar 44: Tapas y Copas is a must-have experience which packs fun, food and flavour between the covers of a beautifully designed book.
The Golden Valley: A Visual Biography of the Garw, Phil Cope
The Golden Valley is a personal account in words and photographs of the Garw where Phil Cope has lived for thirty-five years.
In it he explores the valley’s history: sparsely worked agriculture; boom-town coal exploitation; sudden, followed by gentle, post-industrial decline; attempts at re-invigoration through heritage and leisure; and now, existing in a post-covid world. This is a classic example of close-knit communities shattered by the removal of the thing that bound them together. The valley’s natural beauty – some might say returning natural beauty – is also present, from the minutiae of the lichen on its windswept trees to the river which has shaped the valley with its timeless flow.
Cymru & I, Inclusive Journalism Cymru
In Cymru & I nine new writers look at what Wales means to them as people from backgrounds previously largely underrepresented. Their various viewpoints make this book a new look at Wales, or show a Wales for the most part hidden: a Wales unwritten. Here are essays on identity, integration, the power of language to welcome or divide, acceptance, personal aspiration, civic decline, and hill walking. Wales is the first official Nation of Sanctuary. Among the contributors are those who have sought sanctuary or space in Wales: immigrants – current and first or second generation – neurodivergent, LGBTQ+ and working-class people. Their articulate and compelling essays demand attention.
Wild Places UK : UK’s Top 40 Nature Sites, Iolo Williams
The UK is known for its natural beauty and its wildlife and in Wild Places UK television naturalist Iolo Williams picks his favourite forty wildlife sites from the many nature reserves around the country. From Hermaness on Shetland to the London Wetland Centre, from Dungeness in Kent to Loch Neagh, Williams criss-crosses the country. His list takes in coastal sites from marshes to towering cliffs – and distant islands – mountains, valleys, bogs, meadows, woods and land reclaimed from industry. These wild places vary in size from the vastness of The Wash to the gem that is Skomer Island. They include sites of international significance, like estuarial Slimbridge, and the wild marshes of Forsinard Flows.
Real Dorset, Jon Woolcott
Real Dorset is a discursive, humorous, idiosyncratic and personal look at Dorset. The county is famous for spectacular coastlines, historic towns, its eco-foodie reputation, for Hardy and Fowles. Yet there’s much more behind the tourist-friendly façade – subversion, rebellion and revolt, wealth and poverty, ghost stories, rich folklore, film and music.
Criss-crossing the county, Woolcott makes connections, uncovers the hidden and the forgotten. A huge and lost Neolithic earthwork contrasts with Victorian pleasure gardens and nightlife in Bournemouth. The legacy of the black GIs, the Cerne Abbas Giant, the model village of Milton Abbas, vie for attention with the importance of Dorset for writers and artists including William Barnes, T.E. Lawrence and Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Piper and Elisabeth Frink.
Walking the Valleys, Peter Finch and John Briggs
Over the past two centuries the South Wales Valleys have gone from idyllic rural landscape to the engine room of the British Empire to post industrial decline. Building on the success of their book Walking Cardiff, Peter Finch and John Briggs explore how the Valleys have changed, and how they are evolving for the twenty-first centuries in their new book Walking the Valleys.
The informative texts can be used as both a route finder and a literary entertainment in themselves. John Briggs’s lively photographs provide further detail and each walk is illustrated with a map. Armchair walkers will find the book as interesting and as useful as those actually pull on their boots. And natives and visitors alike will find a new discovery around every corner.
A Hardy Breed; Sheep Farming in Wales, Bruce Cardwell
A Hardy Breed is a collection of 120 photographs, mainly black and white, celebrating shepherding and sheep farming in Wales. It records a way of life under pressure for the past couple of centuries, and more than ever today. The book is an important social document, of reportage, portraiture and documentary photography of an industry threatened by the outcomes of Brexit and other issues, like climate change, biodiversity, agricultural developments. Importantly, many of the communities featured are centres of Welsh language and culture, also under pressure.
Waterfalls of Stars; My Ten Years on the Island of Skomer, Roseanne Alexander
When Rosanne Alexander’s boyfriend Mike was offered the job of warden of Skomer, a small uninhabited island off the south west tip of Wales, they had just ten days to leave college, marry (a condition of employment) and gather their belongings and provisions for the trip to the island. This was the first of many challenges Rosanne and Mike faced during their ten years on the nature reserve, from coping with periods of isolation when they were the island’s only inhabitants, to dwindling food supplies during the winter when rough weather made provisioning from the mainland impossible. Thrown on their own resources they had also to deal with catastrophes like the devastation of the island’s seal colony following an oil spill.
