Library of Wales – serie

Harry Price has worked for years as a railway signalman in the Welsh border village of Glynmawr. Now he has had a stroke, and his son, Matthew, a lecturer at Oxford, returns to the close-knit community that he left. As Harry lies in silent pain in his cramped bedroom, Matthew experiences the jarring familiarity of the childhood world which, alienated, he can no longer re-enter. Struggling with the unspoken tensions and losses that returning home has provoked, he recalls what has made him who he is. Upstairs his deeply thoughtful father recalls his own arrival in the village, the relationships between men during the General Strike, and the social and personal changes that followed, and he struggles to articulate all that has been left unsaid. A beautiful and moving portrait of the love between a father and son, and of the strength and resilience of a small community, Border Countryis Raymond Williams' finest novel

Incest, murder, delusion and a devastating, tragic humour mark these three novellas that Gwyn Thomas wrote in 1946. They are 'Oscar', 'Simeon', and 'The Dark Philosophers'. In this book the grimly humorous philosophers gather in an Italian cafe in the Terraces to tell the tragic tale of comeuppance and manslaughter that they engineer.

Home To An Empty House tells in Alun Richards' incisive style the story of a marriage that has long since lost its sparkle. Walter, the wisecracking paranoiac and Connie, teacher of the 'backward class', are a couple who know a lot about sex but little about each other.

Edwards was a graduate of University College, Cardiff and although spent time in Vienna, Florence and London this was her permanent home. Both Davies and Edwards were clearly influenced by Chekhov (Davies called him "my god") and the stories in "Rhapsody" are reminiscent of his work. This novel established his name as a young writer to watch.

A story of a group of friends as they edge towards adulthood in the sunshine and shadow of Llandudno during the years of the Second World War.

The Voices of the Children is a delicate and heart-felt story of the golden, ephemeral, uncertain world of childhood. Set in a rural mining village in South Wales in the years leading up to the Second World War, George Ewart Evans has recreated a magical but alive world that will resonate with our memories, real and imagined, of childhood.'The hills were freedom, and the valley was the shop, milking the cow, errands, difficult customers, and, last of all, the new baby'“I hope you like it. Me, I loved it.” Gwyn Jones

Foreword by adrian DannatA happiness drug is found to be intolerable to society. Howell Davies describes the process by which its disseminators are hounded to death.Starling knows a chemist called Roper, who knows a painter called Jourbert, who knows a man in Mexico who works for the government. Mescal has always had its routes into the world. There has been a new shipment, but not quite what anyone expected. This is a new drug. It opens the doors of perception for a man like Roper hiding away in his north London laboratory. He can make people work for him, turn his friends into fools or murderers, if only he could control his own mind.... Anita is such a beautiful woman but she could never love a man like Roper... Power, pleasure, always corrupt...

Beti, the beautiful daughter of a pub landlord, is pursued by two men: Llew, her aggressive, red-haired cousin, and Evan, the miller and would-be poet. She has to make a choice but it's not her future alone that depends on her decision. She and Tanygraig are positioned precariously on borders of class, nation, language, and changing times.

A Rope of Vines - Journal from a Greek Island is a beautiful and personal account of the time spent by Brenda Chamberlain on the Greek Island of Ydra in the early 1960s. Sea and harbour, mountain and monastery, her neighbours and friends are unforgettably pictured. Joy and woe are woven fine in this record.

Presents the story of Michael Caradock, a writer whose life has ended violently on an isolated Welsh island. This book follows his protected Welsh childhood, his crucial first encounters with sex, his literary success in London and his final withdrawal to Wales.

An artist at heart, Trystan Morgan grows up in his grandmother’s valley mining cottage, duty-bound by her deep wish for him to be a preacher. He comes from farming stock and longs to paint the Welsh countryside of his people. But he agrees to study at the city university although his adolescent mind revolts at the social posturing around him. Trystan’s journey through the conflicting cultural, social and political values of his country in the mid-twentieth century is bewildering but finally liberating. And through the glittering, crowded, kaleidoscopic images of this bravura novel, the author creates a rich impression of people and place; a Wales which is a landscape of the mind. Glyn Jones was one of the giants of twentieth-century Welsh writing whether as short story writer, critic or poet, and here in his remarkable novel of 1956, he creates a narrative of exceptional power that draws on all these gifts.

One of Merthyr’s Victorian brickyard girls, Saran watches the world parade past her doorstep on the banks of the stinking and rat-infested Morlais Brook: the fair-day revellers; the chapel-goers and the funeral processions. She never misses a trip to the town’s wooden theatres, despite her life ruled by the 5 a.m. hooter, pit strikes, politics and the First World War that takes away so many of her children. Her Glyn will work a treble shift for beer money; her brother Harry is the district’s most notorious drinker and fighter until he is ‘saved’. The town changes and grows but Saran is still there for Glyn, for Harry, for her children and grandchildren.In his 1935 novel Black Parade, writer, soldier and political activist Jack Jones creates a superbly riotous, clear and unsentimental picture of Merthyr life as his home town reels headlong into the twentieth century.

At the heart of Dai Country - the central valleys of twentieth-century South Wales from the 1930s to the 1970s - was the metropolis of Pontypridd, and it is from this vantage point in time and space that Alun Richards cast his baleful eye on the personal relationships and social ambitions of the inhabitants of this much-fabled country. In this compendium volume, the best of his short stories, as funny and savage as they are scathing and compassionate, are combined with his entrancing autobiographical memoir Days of Absence to take us to the core of those incomparable valleys, with their lived experience stripped bare for once of their usual cloak of cliché and sentiment.

The Great God Pan caused a furore in London as the pagan demoness who is its central figure seemed to link the sense of horror with a prurient sexuality. The story concerns the doings of evil scientists and women who become monsters at their hands, and they shed an interesting light on current debates concerning fin de siecle misogyny and evolutionary degeneration. Reprint. 2010.

In rural Radnorshire, the start of the twentieth century brings a new generation that clashes with the conservative traditionalism of an old way of life. Rhys Lloyd, with his ideal of Social Darwinism, is a dangerous figure in the village but his love for church-going Esther Bevan is deeper-rooted still. Esther suffers the casual brutality of her agricultural upbringing with an inner strength which is sorely tested by the trials of love and the land in which she lives.

Lew Morgan and Gladstone Williams are two friends trying to make sense of their lives over a long hot summer in the north Wales seaside town of Porthmawr. It will be a summer that changes everything. When the charming but drunk Ashton Vaughan returns home to Porthmawr – ‘the primeval swamp of respectability’ – he triggers a chain reaction of ruin, disillusion and death which keeps the whole town bubbling for most of the summer. There’s fraud, farce, drama, drunkenness, temperance, hysteria and tragedy. This Welsh take on The Catcher in the Rye is a haunting journey from the edge of childhood into a threatening adult world. A remarkable and welcome rediscovery.

A forced wedding in a freezing country church, where the only sound is the bride’s tears: so starts Mary Bicknor’s life of misery with the brutish Easter Probert, groom to the oddly assorted Kilminster family. In a tale of passion, violence, cruelty and unexpected tenderness, Margiad Evans conjures a tempestuous and sometimes sinister world of rural and small-town border life in the early twentieth century.

Almost undoubtedly Machen's most important and moving work. Lucian Taylor, the hero, is damned either through contact with an erotically pagan 'other' world or through something degenerate in his own nature, which he thinks of as a 'faun' . He becomes a writer, and when he moves to London he becomes trapped by the increasing reality of the dark imaginings of this creature within him, which become increasingly real. Machen drew copiously on his own early years in Wales and London, and the book as a whole is an exploration through imagination of a potential fate which he personally avoided. One of the first explorations in fiction of the figure of the doomed artist, who is biographically so much a part of the decadent 1890s.

In Ron Berry's masterpiece, and kaleidoscopic history of the South Wales valleys, lovers Rees Stevens and Ellen Vaughan must discover and interpret Ellen's father's journal.

This is a limited hardback edition of Dannie Abse's classic memoir Goodbye Twentieth Century. Dannie Abse's rich mixture of Welsh and Jewish backgrounds, and his dual occupations of doctor and author, have led to what is widely regarded as one of the most readable, humorous and poignant autobiographies since the war.

The Water-castle is a journal of love, romance and discord in 1950s Germany as a Welsh artist and poet, Elizabeth Greatorex, travels with her French husband to meet her former lover Klaus, a German count. Elizabeth maps a frost- and snow-bound landscape of desire against the hardening borders of a newly divided Germany. In her revealing diary, she records her struggle to bridge the distance between Wales and Germany, East and West while considering her own mythologised past and real diminished present. Brenda Chamberlain’s writing pits creative idealism, emotional hunger and sexual longing against the brutal displacements of post-war Europe.

The first of Lewis Jones' two epic industrial novels of the 1930s. Big Jim, collier and ex-Boer War soldier, and his partner Siân endure the impact of strikes, riots and war, while their son Len emerges as a sharp thinker and dynamic political organiser. Cwmardy paints a graphic portrait of the casual exploitation, tragedy and violence as well as the political hope and humanity of South Wales industrial workers from the 1900s to the 1930s.

The second of Lewis Jones' two epic industrial novels of the 1930s.Len, son of Big Jim and dynamic political organiser, takes centre stage in Lewis Jones' sequel to Cwmardy. Along his journey, he is influenced by Mary, a teacher, and the Communist Party, which becomes central to his work both underground and in union politics, and to his decision to leave and fight in the Spanish Civil War.We Live paints a graphic portrait of the casual exploitation, tragedy and violence as well as the political hope and humanity of South Wales industrial workers from the 1900s to the 1930s.

A moving and revealing memoir of real life at the turn of the century, Young Emma is W. H. Davies's frank and honest account of the relationship with the woman he encountered on a London street corner who was to become his wife.

Carwyn James treated rugby football as if it was an art form and aesthetics part of the coaching manual. This son of a miner, from Cefneithin in the Gwendraeth Valley, was a cultivated literary scholar, an accomplished linguist, a teacher, and a would-be patriot politician, who also won two caps for Wales. He was the first man to coach any British Lions side to overseas victory, and still the only one to beat the All Blacks in a series in New Zealand. That was in 1971, and it was followed in 1972 by the legendary triumph of his beloved Llanelli against the touring All Blacks at Stradey Park. These were the high-water marks of a life of complexity and contradiction. His subsequent and successful career as broadcaster and journalist and then a return to the game as a coach in Italy never quite settled his restless nature.After his sudden death, alone in an Amsterdam hotel, his close friend, the Pontypridd-born writer, Alun Richards set out through what he called “A Personal Memoir” to reflect on the enigma that had been Carwyn. The result, a masterpiece of sports writing, is a reflection on the connected yet divergent cultural forces which had shaped both the rugby coach and the author; a dazzling sidestep of an essay in both social and personal interpretation. “One of the most readable books on rugby… a stylish contribution to the game’s history.” The Times“The best evocation there is of this charismatic if restless man.” Gerald Davies“The Welsh persona is at the heart of Alun Richard’s book, so much so that the reader could be forgiven for imagining that Dylan Thomas played fly half for Swansea and that Harry Secombe hooked for Pontypool, and perhaps still does… untold pleasure and excitement.” Chris Laidlaw, The Sunday Times“A craftsman, a wordsmith who can compel you to re-read and savour a sentence, a paragraph or a number of pages…” The Observer“Stayed up half the night and cracked the dawn. Loved it.” Cliff Morgan“A beautifully written insight into the very heart and soul of Welsh Rugby and a handsome addition to the literature of the game.” Bill McLaren

Arguably the greatest of all published memoirs of the Great War, Old Soldiers Never Die is Private Frank Richards' classic account of the war from the standpoint of the regular soldier, and a moving tribute to the army that died on the Western Front in 1914.