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The two volumes of Peter Finch’s Collected Poems chart the course of a remarkable writing career. After reading Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as a young man Finch was inspired to become a poet, found the Second Aeon magazine and publishing house, and become a poetry entrepreneur, bringing to all these things an unquenchable vitality which set him apart in contemporary poetry.This second volume includes poems from the ‘second half’ of Finch’s career, in which his poems also appeared in his prose books, and in public places on sculptures and buildings particularly in his native Cardiff. Yet still the poems continued to ‘operate at the far edges of what poetry is understood to be’. Although the poetry landscape of Britain has changed since Finch’s first published poem in 1968, his desire to experiment, to question what constitutes a poem, and to challenge orthodoxy has remained both undiminished and relevant.The Collected Poems is also a restless exploration of the ideas behind the poems. It is a testament to the experimental in literature, to ways of doing it differently, and to an alternative modernist culture in Wales and Britain. Consequently, invaluably, they also open a window on a poetry scene seemingly lost from view to the twenty-first century. They remind us that there was interesting and vital writing happening outside of what has now calcified into the canon of twentieth century British poetry. And that Finch was at its cutting edge with poets like Bob Cobbing and Henri Chopin Paul. Editor Andrew Taylor has included an informative Introduction, a timeline of Finch’s artistic activity, and helpful notes. The book is completed by poet Ian McMillan’s perceptive Foreword.

"Presence and absence, some sort of together" ('On the Beach with Chet Baker').These are the three places that Robert Seatter's second book of poems explores, with deftness, insight and artistry. They move from places of stasis and memory, through the uneasy proximities of love captured in the moody jazz trumpet of the title poem, and out to the uncharted spaces that loss and death can create. His arresting imagination is equally at home with the songs of Elvis Costello and Jacques Brel, a bizarre collection of BBC sound effects, Shakespeare's most famous stage direction or the films of Fellini and Marilyn Monroe, right down to the more mundane details of a bad day at the computer, garden bonfires or the texture of toast...Subtle, artful, intimate, these are appealing poems from a writer whose work is a flowering of his early promise. "Seatter writes sometimes with tremendous momentum which capture the thrill of a particular moment when life was lived with breathtaking intensity"PlanetAfter studying English at Oxford University, Robert Seatter worked variously as an EFL teacher in Italy and France, an actor, a journalist, in publishing and broadcasting. He lives in London where he now works for the BBC. His poetry has been widely published, has won numerous awards and has been featured on radio, television and London buses.

A falling tortoise is a bizarre way to meet one's end, but it is typical of Sheenagh Pugh's wry humour that it finds a place in her poetry. The more humorous aspects of mortality and human frailty receive the same alert consideration as sombre subjects such as dictatorship, torture, the Dieppe raid and pollution. Whether describing the significance of the maximum break in snooker or exploring the mind of a Nazi, Sheenagh Pugh's individual voice resonates throughout her finely crafted poetry."Sheenagh Pugh's work's accessibility is a feature of the clarity and inevitability with which she can pursue intuitions into territories of luminous significance." Poetry Review"Sheenagh Pugh is a remarkable, sometimes brilliant poet. Her great gifts are accessibility, wit, subtle rhyme schemes and the power to illuminate half-forgotten corners of history" Merryn Williams "... among the top two or three poets of her generation writing English poetry in Wales" Poetry WalesSheenagh Pugh is known to thousands of poetry readers for 'Sometimes', her much anthologised 'poem on the underground' and for her Selected Poems, a set text in schools. She currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and has won numerous prizes for her work, including the Babel Prize for translation and the ACW Book of the Year in 2000.

Duncan Bush's new work brings to life, at times painfully, the work of the Russian poet Victor Bal, who 'disappeared' under Stalinism. This surprising and original new book recalls the period by an intermingling of history and fiction which imaginative writers have always understood but that historians have rarely admitted.The Genre of Silence is illustrated by the artist John Selway from original etchings. Duncan Bush was born and brought up in Cardiff, Wales. He was educated at Warwick, Duke and Oxford Universities. His collection Masks (1994) was a PBS Recommendation and Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year. He has also published novels, Glass Shot (Secker) and The Genre of Silence as well as scripts for stage and screen. He currently divides his time between Wales and Europe.

A visceral and intense novel of revolutionary change in Haiti, The Colour of Dawn follows the fortunes of the Méracin family, in particular sisters Angelique and Joyeuse and their brother Fignolé, in a poorer part of Port-au-Prince. Set in the course of a single day, duty to the family and desire for a better life clash with a world of gunfire, racketeering and kidnapping, as the apocalyptic surroundings of the Haitian capital begin to take hold.Yanick Lahens constructs an exquisitely poignant human story and testimony to life, capturing with remarkable economy the fate of both an otherwise ordinary family and a country where monstrosity wants to rule. Translated by Alison Layland."Powerful and unforgettable." - Kate Saunders, The Times.Yanick Lahens lives in Haiti. A professor of literature, she dedicates much of her time to a foundation training young Haitians in sustainable development. Her first novel, Dans la maison du père (In the House of the Father), won the LiBeratur Preis at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2002. The Colour of Dawn was first published as La Couleur de l'aube (2008), which won the Prix du Livre RFO and the Prix littéraire Richelieu de la Francophonie in 2009, along with the 2008 Prix Millepages 2008. Alison Layland won the Translators' House Wales/Oxfam Cymru 2010 Translation Challenge with a translation of one of Lahens' short stories.

The border country between Wales and England is a fertile place in many senses. Settled for millennia, one of the few links we have with early man here are their surviving pagan, pre-Christian wells. Sacred wells have played an important part in the culture and landscape of the region, and continue to do so. Following his books on wells in Wales and Cornwall, Phil Cope journeys up and down the borderlands, and through history from pre-Christian times through Roman and early Christian times, the medieval Age of the Princes in Wales and on to Victorian and the contemporary period. His discoveries are recorded in striking and atmospheric photographs which are accompanied by the remarkable histories of the wells, and the legends attached to them. Wronged suitors, magic horses, Dark Age battles, the reign of King Arthur, and innumerable decapitations feature among the vividly magical tales. Alongside them rests a different kind of magic in the healing wells of the Christian saints, some of which are also sources of prophecy. As the centuries past healing mutated into health and the development of the spa, until, in the twentieth century a full circle was turned and wells once again acquired a pagan significance. Richly illustrated in colour throughout the wells from Cheshire to Monmouthshire, from the Dee to the Severn are here displayed in all their glory, be they in remote countryside or city centre.

Drawing on the age-old appeal of folklore (and a good ghost story), this new collection of short fiction is centred around the act of collecting and recovering the past. As the rich, haunting stories unfold, there are dangerous obsessions with iconic, sacrosanct objects, and puzzling and poignant conversations with the other side.Then, in the central novella 'The Collectors', two doctors and a folklorist meet in northern Brittany in 1898, determined to prove that the scourge of leprosy still exists. But their search soon draws them into a dark, watchful landscape where superstition is rife."A considerable achievement."Stevie Davies, New Welsh Review on The BreathingMary-Ann Constantine is a research fellow at Aberystwyth, specialising in Welsh and Breton Romanticism. Her short stories have appeared over a number of years in the New Welsh Review and Planet, and her first collection, The Breathing, was published by Planet in 2008.

Christopher Meredith's latest collection is filled with gorgeous, original depictions of the landscape of Wales, especially the Black Mountains near the author's home.Beginning in the Stone Age and ending in the future, well-known forms appear alongside vigorous experiments, all touching on the various histories, and human fallibilities, that shape our present lives."The defining feature of Christopher Meredith's poetry is an exquisite, almost painful precision. But there is also beauty and a bright, self-deprecating wit."Sarah Crown, The GuardianChristopher Meredith was born in Tredegar. His most recent poetry collection, The Meaning of Flight (Seren, 2005), was longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award in 2006. His novels, all published by Seren, are Griffri (1995), Shifts (1997), Sidereal Time (1998) and The Book of Idiots (2012). His many prizes include an Eric Gregory Award. A former steelworker and schoolteacher, he now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, and lives in Brecon.

Bruce Cardwell's latest book is a celebration of the harp in Wales, an instrument as symbolically key to a Welsh identity as the flag itself.Cardwell provides a history of the harp in Wales: how it grew to prominence, its evolving role in Welsh culture and symbolism, and the booming harp business today. He also explores the craft of harpmaking, including the variety of construction, materials, designs and aesthetics, issues of 'playability' and tone, and the fusion of craft skills with artistic sensibilities. The book also contains portraits of 36 contemporary Welsh harpists, their individual repertoires and how they see their place in the continuing tradition. These harpists include Catrin Finch, Elinor Bennett, Delyth Jenkins, Robin Huw Bowen, Twm Morys, Gwenan Gibbard, Harriet Earis and Llio Rhydderch.Bruce Cardwell is the author of Hoofpicks: Photographs of the Horse in Wales (Seren, 2009) and Noteworthy: Images of Music (Seren, 2011). He is also a practising folk musician, playing flute, violin and citrain, and has appeared in Wales, Britain, Ireland and Europe. He lives in Aberystwyth.

David Llewellyn's third Seren novel is a tale of unlikely friendship, between two unlikelier travel companions on the unlikeliest of journeys. Ibrahim is a young Muslim Londoner, walking, for many reasons, from Cardiff to London. On the way he meets Reenie, a 75 year-old Jewish woman who escaped to the East End on the Kindertransport. Complete with her whole life's luggage in a shopping trolley, plus pet cockatiel, Reenie is also walking the M4, and not for charity, either. As the pair share the trip across England and Wales, their paths stretch out into the personal and political turns of European history, in ways neither could have foreseen."A compulsive read... in its hilarious depiction of the grim hypocrisy of modern working life, Eleven is on a par with The Office." – Ray French, The Guardian on ElevenDavid Llewellyn is a novelist and script writer from Pontypool. His first novel, Eleven, written entirely in emails, was published in 2006, followed by Everything Is Sinister in 2008, both published by Seren. He has written two novels for BBC Books' Doctor Who New Series Adventures: The Taking of Chelsea 426 and Night of the Humans, and Trace Memory, a Torchwood spin-off. David now lives and works in Cardiff.

The Claims Office is the debut collection from one of the rising young stars of British poetry. Dai George's work is characterised by a mix of rebellious energy and unflinching satire: 'nature' poems that are often anti-nature; lively pieces about the metropolises of London and New York; skewed love poems like 'Plans with the Unmet Wife'.Poems about his native Wales alternate between the elegiac and the edgy, displaying a suspicion of authority and a reluctance to conform to nationalist cliché that places him in the lineage of poets like RS Thomas, Robert Minhinnick, Duncan Bush, John Ormond and Mike Jenkins."Lavish, well-executed... lyrics that seek to communicate directly with the reader."– Jane Holland, Poetry SocietyDai George was born in Cardiff in 1986 and has studied in Bristol and New York. He has had poems and critical articles published on Guardian Online, and in Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review and others. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including the Salt Book of Younger Poets (2011; ISBN 9781907773105) and Best British Poetry (Salt, 2013; ISBN 9781907773556). Often returning to his native Wales, he now lives and teaches in London.

Everything I Have Always Forgotten is an idiosyncratic memoir of a Swallows and Amazons-style childhood in north Wales in the 1940s and 50s. Owain Hughes grew up in the family's large but dilapidated house, son of the novelist Richard Hughes – whose circle included Bertrand Russell and Mick Jagger, aristocrats and spies – and the artist Frances Bazley, a member of the Howard family which includes the Dukes of Norfolk. Under their 'benign neglect', Owain's adventures include, aged just 12, a three-day hike through Snowdonia with a friend that ended up with the pair marooned for two weeks on Bardsley Island off the north Welsh coast. There are also trips to the Dyfi Estuary and Clough Williams-Ellis's folly village of Portmeirion. The stories that result perfectly capture a period of post-war British life that looks back to Brideshead Revisited but also forward to kitchen-sink drama and angry young men.Owain Hughes was born in 1943 was educated at Shrewsbury School and Oxford, after which he spent many years travelling, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. The author of two novels, he now lives in New York and Mexico.

The Visitations is the follow-up to Kathryn Simmonds' Forward Prize-winning debut, Sunday at the Skin Launderette. The poems are entertaining, amusing and accessible, but unafraid to bring in darker themes and worlds unseen. The tone shifts throughout between the elegiac and the sharply satirical, lit up with life's moments of sudden illumination: a life coach finds an old passport, an infant teeters on the brink of speech."This playful and knowing first collection is fuelled throughout by a strong sense of lyricism." – The Guardian on Sunday at the Skin LaunderetteKathryn Simmonds' first book of poems, Sunday at the Skin Launderette (Seren, 2008; ISBN 9781854114617), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Felix Dennis Prize, and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Her pamphlet of poems Snug was a winner in the Poetry Business competition in 2004 and subsequently published by Smith/Doorstop (ISBN 9781902382678). She lives in London and works as a freelance writer, editor and teacher.

Hannah King is a liar, so everyone says. That means her stories of growing up in the Rhondda, as told in Six Pounds Eight Ounces, must be treated with caution.Debut novelist Rhian Elizabeth opens Hannah's notebook up on her own little world of crazy friends and crazy family, and a crazy school with crazy teachers who aren't always what they seem. From dolls and sherbet lemons, to a bright student who drops out of school in favour of drink, drugs and glam rock up on an estate which feels like another planet, Hannah, it seems, has always been trouble.Rhian Elizabeth is 24 and from the Rhondda. She has been developing this book over a number of years, starting it on a creative writing course with the University of Glamorgan. She is also working on a second book, which she says is not about growing up in the Rhondda.

When the TV makeover people come to call, forty-something green campaigner Tessa is mortified at what they rake up, not only about her wardrobe but also her youthful stay at Greenham Common. Love and Fallout is a hugely entertaining novel from debut novelist and award-winning poet Kathryn Simmonds.Kathryn Simmonds was born in Hertfordshire and worked in children's publishing before taking a creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia in 2002. Her collection Sunday at the Skin Launderette won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines and broadcast on Radio 4, and she has written an afternoon play for Radio 4 called Poetry for Beginners. She published her second poetry collection, The Visitations, in 2013.

'In Imagined Sons Carrie Etter reflects on the experience of a birthmother who gave up her son when she was seventeen. In a series of haunting, psalm-like prose poems of enormous courage and insight, she describes possible encounters with this son now in his late teens, expressing how 'sometimes the melancholy arrives before the remembering'. The series of 'Birthmother's Catechisms' return to repeated, harrowing questions that yield different answers at different moments. This quite extraordinary book by a writer of great imagistic power and skill leaves a mark on the reader which is ineradicable. These are poems of the utmost importance.'Bernard O'DonoghueBorn in Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter has lived in California and the UK and is a poet, essayist, critic and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She is the author of a number of poetry books and pamphlets including The Tethers (Seren, ISBN: 9781854114921) which won a London Festival Fringe First Book Prize and she has edited the anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman), Her poetry and criticism have appeared widely in the USA and the UK including Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian.

Floralingua accompanies Shani Rhys James' new touring exhibition of paintings and an installation which distills the motifs of her recent work into a three dimensional audio experience. Here are Rhys James' characteristic wild wallpapers, menacing chandeliers and other domestic items in a specially created room, in which poems appear from amidst flowers. Seven poets respond to the situations in the paintings to create a compelling dialogue between paint and word on issues of domesticity, the relationship of women and home, rootlessness and what the places in which we live say about us. The responding poets are: Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, Menna Elfyn, Jasmine Donahaye, Amy Wack, Pele Cox and Patrick Christopher Kavanagh.Shani Rhys James was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1953. She trained at St. Martin's School of Art, and has been living and working in Wales for 30 years. Influenced by Gillian Ayers, Jan Svankmajer, Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon and Rembrandt, her work is to be found important public and private collections around the world. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including The Jerwood Painting Prize, The Hunting Observer Prize, a National Portrait Award, The Mostyn Open, the Gold Medal at the National Eisteddfod and Welsh Woman of Culture. She was awarded an MBE in 2006, and also received a Creative Wales Award from the Arts Council of Wales in 2006.

The border town of Hay-on-Wye is famous for two things: the annual Festival of Literature (now in its 31st year) and its stunning location.Jim Saunders new book is a photographic record and words about Hay-on-Wye, its environs and people. The result is a record of the relationship in which a landscape of great natural beauty shapes a people, and a people shape a very special place.Jim Saunders is a photographer based in Knighton. He is the author of Offa's Dyke (Gomer/BBC Wales, 2006), and is a former Offa's Dyke Trail Officer. He has also published Natur y flwyddyn, a book of nature photographs (Gomer 2007), and regularly lectures about his photography, which has been published by Aurum, Chatto, Penguin, Thames & Hudson, BBC History, Heritage Magazine and the Countryside Council for Wales, as well as newspapers.

In Her Own Words is a collection of interviews with women poets from Wales. The subjects range in age (from their thirties to their nineties), in geographic location, and in themes and subject matter. The interviews variously explore topics ranging from personal biography, the complex joys and strains of balancing life with art, issues of cultural politics, gender, family life, to the women's often contrasting experiences of various kinds of change, including political devolution. The challenges and tensions associated with living and working – or for Wales-identifying writers like Deryn Rees-Jones and Wendy Mulford, not living and working – in Wales' dual-language culture is a lodestone for the book.

“Murray’s latest novel, set in crumbling postwar England, brings a 21st-century sensibility to a haunted Victorian house. Sugar Hall is host to themes of slavery, migration, exploitation, and history’s habit of updating its uglier productions with new actors and costumes.” – David MitchellEaster 1955. As Britain waits for a hanging, Dieter Sugar finds a boy in the red gardens of Sugar Hall: a boy who wears a silver collar. In the great house, Dieter’s mother, Lilia, scrapes the rust from the locks, the ice from the windows and battles with her own ghosts. But there are pasts hiding with the moths and rats that Lilia cannot remove so easily. Sugar Hall holds a secret: a history that has been buried but not forgotten.Based on the haunting stories of Littledean Hall in the Forest of Dean, this is a superbly spine tingling tale, and the perfect accompaniment for dark nights. Selected by David Mitchell as one of his top six ghost stories.

A shattered Judas Iscariot – that byword for betrayal – tells his own story in Damian Walford Davies compelling and finely wrought collection. We follow Judas over the course of five days as he moves through first-century Jerusalem trying to make sense of the bewildering events surrounding the life and execution of Jesus. But this is a man for whom the future is as real as his anguished and traumatized present, and for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict is as urgent as the tension between the Romans and Jews.Emphasising our compulsion to create, and challenge, gospel truths, Judas gives voice to man caught up in the promise and violence of history.

Kim Moore, in her lively debut poetry collection, The Art of Falling, sets out her stall in the opening poems, firmly in the North amongst 'My People': "who swear without knowing they are swearing - scaffolders and plasterers and shoemakers and carers - ". 'A Pslam for the Scaffolders' is a hymn for her father's profession. The title poem riffs on the many sorts of falling "so close to failing or to falter or to fill". The poet's voice is direct, rhythmic, compelling. These are poems that confront the reader, steeped in realism, they are not designed to soothe or beguile. They are not designed with careful overlays of irony and although frequently clever, they are not pretentious but vigorously alive and often quite funny. In the first section there is: a visit to a Hartley street spiritualist, a train trip from Barrow to Sheffield, a Tuesday at Wetherspoons. The author's experience as a peripatetic brass teacher sparks several poems. The lives of others also feature throughout, including a quietly devastating central sequence, 'How I abandoned My Body To His Keeping': is the story of a woman embroiled in a relationship marked by coercion and violence. These are close-to-the-bone pieces, harrowing and exact. The final section includes beautifully imagined character portraits of John Lennon and Wallace Hartley (the violinist on the Titanic), as well as Jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and the poet Shelley and other poems on: suffragettes, a tattoo inspired by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and a poetic letter addressed to a 'Dear Mr Gove'.

Anne-Marie Fyfe's poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces - a deserted stage-set, our own personalised 'museum', a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage - the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life's exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go - The book opens with 'The Red Aeroplane' where witnessing an apparent plane crash sparks a vertiginous sequence of image and memory, 'the way sureties tilt and untangle'. We know that we will follow the author in exploring not just specific places and memories but the 'exponential function of tangents', all that is implied and suggested. Some poems beguile with mysterious pageants or processions. 'Honey and Wild Locusts' offers us a curious inventory of objects: 'in-patients' marching in 'Florentine masks' and 'beekeeper veils'. These baroque surfaces are both satire and demonstration of a complicated 21st century full of dark conflicts and temptations. Liminal states, such as the insomnia permeating 'The Outer Provinces of Sleep', also suit the peculiar physics of these dream-like poetic rooms. There are also a series of shorter poems that, in a direct tone of address, simpler language and intent, counterpoint the richness and density of the longer poems. These, such as 'Winnower' speak to an opposing pragmatic viewpoint: "Everyone can use a listener, who/ won't demur, pass judgement, won't/ agree necessarily." There is a winning intimacy to these shorter poems, they clear our palates and prepare us for the longer, more involved set pieces with all of their carefully delineated and often darkly gorgeous imagery such as the terrifying bees in 'Before the Swarm': "The cloud-level shoal with their vivid insignia".

Richard Parry is a painter who cannot paint, a writer who doesn't write. His obsession is Lulu, that 'orphan off the street', his aboriginal 'green child'. But on returning from Australia to his hometown he finds it has become notorious for the suicides of young people. As Parry tries to connect past and present he is haunted by dreams of Australia and of his youth. Yet is Parry all he seems? Isn't he frankly, 'a bit creepy'? How trustworthy is memory? And what has happened to the vivacious Lulu?Robert Minhinnick is the prize-winning author of two volumes of essays, seven volumes of poetry and a novel. He has also edited a book on the environment in Wales, written for television and provided columns for The Western Mail and Planet. He is the co-founder of the environmental organisation, Sustainable Wales, and was formerly the editor of Poetry Wales.

As in so many areas of Britain sacred wells persist in Scotland in the face of modernity. Holy Wells: Scotland is an exploration of just some of the many hundreds of wells in the country, carefully researched and beautifully photographed by experienced well-hunter Phil Cope. The book is a sweeping journey from the northwards from the Borders through mainland Scotland to the Orkney s before sweeping through the Hebrides to end on the sacred isle of Iona. On his travels Cope finds a multiplicity of wells with a variety of functions, ancient and modern. From the wells of Calton Hill in Edinburgh (place of an annual pagan festival), to modestly developed springs in fields or on the deserted coastline come healing wells, cursing wells, and wells named for saints, Satan, witches, angels, fairies, heroes and poets. And attached to many are folk tales, myths and legends, which Cope relates in his accompanying narrative, along conversations with contemporary well-users and poems inspired by Scottish wells. The first book on Scottish wells for over three decades, and the first to be so lavishly illustrated with colour photographs, Holy Wells: Scotland is both a record of some of the country's many wells and a celebration of their continuing relevance to the identity of Scotland today. Holy Wells: Scotland is the fourth title in the Holy Wells series, which includes books on Wales, Cornwall and Borderlands.

When Richard Collins was diagnosed with a progressive incurable disease in 2006 he decided to see as much of the world as he could while his condition allowed. The result is The Road to Zagora, a singular travel book which takes in India, Nepal, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Peru, Equador and Wales. 'Mr Parkinson', as Collins refers to his condition, informs the narrative. As inveterate walkers Collins and his partner Flic decided to continue to travel 'close to the land' post diagnosis, leaving the tourist trails and visiting places of extremes: the Himalayas, rainforests, deserts. The difficulties of rough terrain, altitude, extremes of climate for a person with Collins' condition are an ongoing strand of his narrative; occasionally they cannot be overcome and Collins is forced to consider the frailties of the human body in passages of moving contemplation. The Road to Zagora also includes an element of memoir, as Parkinson's Disease also causes Collins to reflect on his life, and in particular on his relationship with Flic. There are moments of great charm as their relationship evolves, and also the drama of previous serious illnesses. These recollections of pre-diagnosis life have the wistfulness of hindsight as Collins considers what constitutes a life well lived. Yet any sentiment or self-pity is denied through Collins's resolute and independent- mindedness and the quality of writing. In the travel passages the readers experiences the sheer physicality of Collins' expeditions, along with his novelist's eye for telling local detail. In the sequences of memoir the writing is humane, compassionate and quite often comic. The Road to Zagora is a memorable journey around the world, and the self.

As Police officer Sophia Künstler slips through the backstreets of Berlin looking for sex, Kathe, her old GDR friend, is murdered in the park near Sophia's apartment. Outside Sophia’s home a frightened girl waits. Sophia is thrown back into a shocking past when she returns to her East German home town of Breden to investigate Kathe’s murder. She must confront the horrors she left behind as a teenager in a secret and bloody flight west, orchestrated by her enigmatic father Petrus. But as old lies are laid bare Sophie begins to realize the secrets she is hunting down are also her own.