literature

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‘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
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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


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‘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

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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

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‘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

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‘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
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‘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

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‘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


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‘Real Swansea’

Published 22nd April 2008 by Nigel Jenkins.

Welcome to the breezily resurgent, ´ugly, lovely´ city of Swansea. Once a dynamic port and the metallurgical capital of the world, it was later famous for a vibrant artistic life, which included poets Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, artists Alfred Janes and Ceri Richards and composer Daniel Jones. What does it offer now, in post-industrial Wales?
Brought up in Gower and living in Mumbles, poet Nigel Jenkins takes the reader on a tour of the obvious and the oblique, the monumental and the downright quirky. Fusing civic and social history with auto-biographical reminiscence, Jenkins brings to life a place which mixes Dylan heritage with rugby and football passions and a rare fervour for music; the natural beauty of the Bay and Clyne Valley with the dereliction of the Lower Swansea Valley and the charm of Mumbles; the frenzy of Swansea?s night-life with the tranquillity of its pioneering parks; the lofty Townhill estate, once in the vanguard of garden city housing, with the swanky postmodernism of the SA1 development at its eastern gateway.
Eclectic, gritty, whimsical, there is no better way to discover Wales´s second city – which Swansea’s citizens believe to be its first.
‘Real’ Series Editor, Peter Finch
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‘Real Aberystwyth’

Released 9th April 2008 by Niall Griffiths.

Aberystwyth: two languages, a university, a farming community, a port turned marina, a holiday resort, seat of the National Library of Wales and the Welsh Books Council, home to writers and spies. It is a singular place composed of any number of conflicting and complimentary things, with a medieval beginning, Victorian heyday and contemporary reputation as a cultural powerhouse in the guise of a market town.

Aberystwyth is a fluid mix of long-established natives, large student population, and a colony of those who came and never left. Niall Griffiths falls among the latter and the town and its environs have provided rich material for his fiction. Here he mixes autobiography with topography, aligns the oblique approach with historical report, and contrasts the prosaic with the downright odd. The birthplace of the Welsh Language Society, the home of saints, the playground of writers, crucible of alternative living, Aberystwyth and its hinterland are a remarkable phenomenon. This book is an enthralling picture of a world famous town.

An award-winning novelist, Niall Griffiths is a regular reviewer for The Guardian and a commentator on contemporary writing for a number of magazines.

‘Real’ Series Editor, Peter Finch