Between Two Seas

R.D. Cook

The Loser

Fatos Kongoli

Real Wrexham

Grahame Davies

“Grahame Davies has a lively mind and a fine turn of phrase, which he puts to good purpose here.” Meic Stephens, Cambria, Feb 08

Wrexham, the biggest town in north Wales gets the ´Real´ treatment from novelist and poet Grahame Davies. Born in Coedpoeth, now much-travelled, he´s still endlessly fascinated by his home town. Mixing personal experience and memory with history, topography, journalism, and an unflagging interest, Davies looks beyond the town´s workaday image and finds something rather special …

The ´Real´ series is edited by Peter Finch and also includes Real Cardiff, Real Cardiff 2 and Real Newport.

Check out a BBC blog review of the book here, and another two blogs here and here!

At Arm´s Length

Geraint Talfan Davies

Devolution to Wales and Scotland may prove to have been the most profound change in the UK in recent years. The consequences are far-reaching, and not just political. Geraint Talfan Davies, media and arts executive for more than three decades, recalls and reflects on the impact of this development for culture and civil society…

“The story is beautifully told, with diary entries, dramatic suspense, humour and wickedly accurate pen portraits all brought into play.” Peter Stead, New Welsh Review, May 08

Everything is Sinister

David Llewellyn

Everything is Sinister by David Llewellyn is a darkly humorous novel with a biting take on the modern cult of celebrity and its potentially horrific consequences. Ed Raynes is the showbiz correspondent for Britain´s most popular tabloid, The Voice of the People. In the sweltering, tinderbox summer of 2010, with the Olympic village construction site on his doorstep, Ed guards a shocking secret …

“Llewellyn smartly conjures up a world that is eerily all too familiar…in Everything is Sinister, Llewellyn has created a nightmarish, repulsive vision of the near future, but his style is so engaging, his world so credible and unsettling, that I defy you not to reach the very bitter, bloody end of this engaging read.” Attitude, May 08

Check out a review of Everything is Sinister on The Telegraph website here

Real Aberystwyth

Niall Griffiths

Real Swansea

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?

Series Editor, Peter Finch.

2001 A Year in Wales

Patrick Hannan

The sound of laughter is rarely far away as Patrick Hannan watches the events of 2001 unfold and describes them in this chronicle of a year in Wales. The result is a revealing picture of the kind of country Wales now is, its obsessions, its ambitions, its divisions, and the nature of the people who run it or want to run it …

Academe

Paul Groves

Paul Groves’s first volume confirms the promise which has marked him out as one of the most engaging poetic voices of recent years. Crystalline, deft, and exhilaratingly ironic, these poems deserve a wide audience ...

Act One Wales

Phil Clark

This substantial collection of one act plays from Wales charts the rise of Welsh Drama from the 1950s to the present. From the Dylan Thomas classic, ’Return Journey’, to the work of established names likes Charles Way and Frank Vickery, to the more recent plays by young writers like Edward Thomas and Ian Rowlands, this book presents a significant overview of the drama of our era …