Welsh Fiction

Successful artist Olwen Pritchard returns to the village where she grew up. and where her family home has recently been sold following the death of her parents. Something is compelling her to make this journey where the ghosts of her childhood take shape guided by her eight-year-old alter ego. Olwen's life, growing up in the nineteen fifties in a small welsh village, is examined through the eyes of the child during the year following her eighth birthday. Tentacles from the past reach into the present as alongside the story of the child, are the older woman’s nostalgic and poignant ...

Split into five sections - Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering - Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians, and Italian divas. Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent, and funny - a gift to readers and writers both.

Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books - selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude - have been described as ‘virtuoso performances’ and ‘small masterpieces'. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche.

As nineteenth birthday presents go, this one was a little out of the ordinary! My boss had taken me away for the weekend to Las Vegas and as an added treat he’d bought me a VIP booth on the huge Ferris Wheel that overlooks the strip. On the way round it we start doing a strip of our own and before long he’s thrusting himself through my wetness. I’m so desperate for him to finish inside me—is that a mistake? Listen as he takes me, far above the shining lights of Vegas.

Byron's exuberant masterpiece tells of the adventures of Don Juan, a handsome and charming young man naturally gifted with the ladies. After his first illicit love affair at the age of 16 in his native Spain, he is exiled to Italy. Following a dramatic shipwreck, his exploits take him to Greece, where he is sold as a slave, and to Russia, where he becomes a favorite of the Empress Catherine, who sends him on to England.

Susan has everything she ever wanted. A loving husband, an angelic daughter and the cottage of her dreams in County Cork. Her picture-perfect life seems too good to be true. And it is. At a housewarming party with their new neighbours, her daughter Amelia goes missing. As friends become suspects, Susan’s life spirals out of control. And when Amelia’s yellow cardigan is dredged from the lake, every parent’s worst nightmare suddenly seems horribly real. In the aftermath of Amelia’s disappearance Susan and her husband Paul are not themselves. Someone is hiding something.

Make Shakespeare a part of your daily routine with Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year, a yearlong collection of passages from Shakespeare's greatest works. Drawing from the full spectrum of plays and sonnets to mark each day of the year, whether it's a scene from Hamlet to celebrate Christmas or a Sonnet in June to help you enjoy a summer's day. There are also passages to mark important days in the Shakespeare calendar, both from his own life and from his plays.

The Book of Wonder is the seventh book and fifth original short story collection of Irish fantasy writer Lord Dunsany, who is considered a major influence on the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others. The book collects 14 fantasy short stories. Lord Dunsany employed the talents of Sidney Sime to illustrate his fantasy short story collections, but The Book of Wonder’s unique in that Sydney Sime drew the illustrations first, and Lord Dunsany wrote the narratives afterward.

Lady Audley is universally adored: Beautiful, kind and charming, she enamors all whom she meets. It is not until the strange disappearance of widower George Talboys that her behavior takes an odd turn. George's friend, Robert Audley, Lady Audley's nephew-in-law, is on the case; an upper-class layabout turned detective, he is determined to get to the bottom of things.

When Lucy Brennan, a Miami Beach personal-fitness trainer, disarms an apparently crazed gunman chasing two frightened homeless men along a deserted causeway at night, the police and the breaking-news cameras are not far behind. Within hours, Lucy becomes a hero. Her celebrity is short-lived, though: the "crazed gunman", turns out to be a victim of child sexual abuse and the two men are serial pedophiles.

Grik the goblin spends his days as a janitor cleaning the Metropolitan Dance Hall, drawn to the Elvish world and tired of the darkness of his underground home. He secretly pines for the ballet company’s lead dancer, Rosanna, but his own ugliness and shyness stand in the way of confessing his love.

Set during the fierce Trojan War, Troilus and Criseyde is the poignant tale of love won and lost. The beautiful Criseyde becomes the object of desire for Troilus, the son of King Priam, and he is able to win her affection through the machinations of his uncle, Pandarus. They experience a brief time of bliss together, but despite their vows of faithfulness, they are soon separated by the fortunes of war.

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories, written in the Middle English vernacular, supposedly told among a group of pilgrims traveling from London to Canterbury. Chaucer uses the form, possibly based on knowledge of Boccaccio’s Decameron gained on a visit to Italy in 1373, to provide a highly varied portrait of his society, both secular and religious. The journey of the pilgrims, unlike that of, say, Homer’s Odysseus or of Dante in the Divine Comedy, is relatively unimportant compared to the tales themselves, where Chaucer’s true interest lies.

When Rilke, a dissolute auctioneer, comes upon a hidden collection of violent and highly disturbing photographs, he feels compelled to discover more about the deceased owner who coveted them. Soon he finds himself sucked into an underworld of crime, depravity and secret desire, fighting for his life.

The Parliamentry troops believe he will hide in the home of Colonel Beverly, a famous Cavalier - they surround the house believeing they will smoke him out. No King is found and they are told that they have killed the four children who were in the house - but they escape with the old forester, Jacob Armitage, who must now teach them to lose their lace, and velvet manners and behave and look like Puritans

When her father remarries, the honest, innocent Molly Gibson suddenly finds herself with a new stepsister, Cynthia, who is beautiful, worldly and impetuous. This would be more than enough to deal with, but the new wife is the deeply snobbish (and darkly secretive) Hyacinth. Thwarted love, scheming ambition and small-town gossip underlie the warmth, irony and brilliant social observation which link the relationships and the inevitable conflicts as profound change comes to rural England.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the English poet William Blake consists of a series of texts written in the style of biblical prophecy but expressing Blake's own beliefs. Composed between 1790 and 1793, the book makes reference to Milton and Swedenborg, and adopts a device from Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost: a visit to hell. Blake expresses a deliberately depolarized and unified vision of the cosmos in which the material world and physical desire are both part of the divine order.

The 1660s were a time of turmoil in England: Cromwell had been defeated and Charles II, who was sympathetic to the Catholics, was restored to the throne; the Dutch declared war on England; the Plague raged; and the Great Fire of London destroyed half the city! Our hero, Cyril, at the death of his father Sir Aubrey Shenstone, inherits nothing except his father's title, and works as a bookkeeper for various London tradesmen.

April 20th, 1968: Enoch Powell, MP for Wolverhampton South West, gives a speech that shakes a community and Britain to its very core. Words that provoke, that divide...that profoundly affect the lives of those they touch. Mrs. Georgina Verington-Delaunay is an administrator working in the Conservative riding office of Enoch Powell. Frank and Christine are art students inadvertently caught in an undercurrent of intolerance. Nelson and his aunt Irene are Jamaican immigrants striving to make a life for themselves in a turbulent atmosphere.

At thirty-three, nurse Heather is desperately waiting for her romantic life to begin. Then she meets handsome, strong Anthony and is sure she’s found the one. Brushing any doubts aside, she projects all her hopes for true love onto him. Meanwhile, at a yoga retreat in Spain, happy-go-lucky Joe can’t believe his luck when he meets vivacious, witty Amy. She’s the sharpest, most beautiful woman he has ever dated, and the fact that she’s interested in him feels like a dream come true.