"To read Machen is to journey into the heart of ecstasy and terror" - Mark Samuels

 

 "One of the best horror writers ever" - Mark E. Smith

"A magnificently conceived work." - The Guardian

“Incident and character are vividly depicted, period is richly evoked and the descriptive passages remind one what a splendid poet the author is.” - The Observer

“An entertaining and at times moving book. Mr Abse relates some very amusing anecdotes, and his informal yet controlled style is capable of moving without any sense of dislocation from these lighter occasions to deeply serious and affecting passages.” - Times Literary Supplement

"Black Parade (1935) is strong because it includes the many-sided turbulence, the incoherence and contradictions, which the more available stereotypes of the history exclude. It can be properly contrasted with Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley (1939), widely and properly seen as the export version of the Welsh industrial experience." Raymond Williams

“What we encounter here are reality and the tragic elements of

dream... a remarkable achievement.” The New York Times

"Fluent first novel" - Times Literary Supplement

"Remarkable indeed. Gladstone is quite beautifully described and presented and everywhere there is evidence of the quality of the author’s mind" - The Times

Synopsis:

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 in this work. 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.

About the author:

Thomas Evan Jones was born in 1922 and brought up in Pwllheli, north Wales. He attended University College Bangor, where his studies were halted by World War Two and five years in the British Army. He found himself in France on D Day, and was later promoted from private to corporal and given a signal detachment in India and Burma. After demobilisation he completed his degree and teaching qualifications. In 1952 he took the position of lecturer in Liberal Studies at Leyland Motors Technical College in Lancashire, where he remained until his retirement. He married and was the father to two daughters.

His first novel, Make Room for the Jester, was published in 1964 in both the UK and the USA to much critical acclaim. It was followed in 1966 by The Ballad of Oliver Powell (published under the title The Man with the Talents in the USA), and in 1968 by his third and last novel, The Lost Boy. He published all his books under the name of Stead Jones. He died in 1985

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This title is also available as an ebook: http://thelibraryofwales.com/node/68

"Rhys Davies's characters all walk straight out of the page and hold one with an almost physical attraction." - The Times

Synopsis:

The Withered Root recounts the troubled life of Reuben Daniels, reared in a South Wales industrial valley, in the bosom of the Nonconformist culture. Therein lies his downfall and that of his people, for The Withered Root is as thoroughly opposed to Welsh Nonconformity as My People (Caradoc Evans), though for different reasons. Revivalist passions constitute nothing but a perverse outlet for an all too human sexuality which chapel culture has otherwise repressed. Nonconformity has withered the root of natural sexual well-being in the Welsh, and then feeds off the twisted fruits.

About the author:

Rhys Davies (1901–1978) was one of the most prolific and unusual writers to emerge from the Welsh industrial valleys in the twentieth century. Born in Clydach Vale, a tributary valley of the Rhondda arising from Tonypandy, he was the fourth child of a small grocer and an uncertified schoolteacher. He spurned conventional education and left the valley, which was to be the basis of much of his work, at the age of nineteen, settling in London, which was to remain his base until he died.

Early in his literary career, he travelled to the south of France where he was befriended by D. H. Lawrence, who remained an influence in his writing. Though sex remained, for Davies, the primary determinant of human relations, he differed radically from Lawrence in that he saw the struggle for power rather than love, either sexual or emotional, as the crucial factor.

Though the bulk of his work was in the novel he achieved his greatest distinction in the field of the short story. Having few predecessors, Welsh or English, he drew his inspiration and models from continental European and Russian masters; Chekhov and Maupassant, Tolstoy and Flaubert. His view of humanity was Classical in that he saw people as being identically motivated whether in biblical Israel, Ancient Greece or the Rhondda valley. Much of his output was concerned with women, who would almost invariably emerge triumphant from any conflict.

He was a gay man at a time when it was difficult to live openly with his sexuality. He lived alone for most of his life and avoided relationships which seemed to betoken commitment on his part. His closest friendships were with women. He avoided literary coteries and groups, though he might have joined several, and held no discernible religious or political convictions. He lived, to an intense degree, for his art.

Short extract:

Hugh Daniels at last got married, and immediately after the ceremony in Pisgah Chapel, Martha and he settled down to life in the little cottage that was part of Martha’s legacy from her deceased father – a dwelling in one of those naked rows, chiefly occupied by colliers, that rise, shrouded in grey coal-dust, on the Valley hills.

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Buy The Withered Root from the Parthian online bookstore for £7.99

“I hope you like it. Me, I loved it.”
- Gwyn Jones

Synopsis:

The old valleys have got something flying about in them beside the coal dust.

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.

About the author:

George Ewart Evans was born in 1909, in the mining village of Abercynon. He was one of a family of eleven children whose parents ran a grocer's shop- the setting of his semi-autobiographical novel Voices of the Children(1947). After education at Mountain Ash County School and University College Cardiff- where he read classics and trained as a teacher- he had ambitions of being a writer. He published verse and short stories- many with a Welsh background- in various literary journals, and extracts from Voices of the Children first appeared in The Welsh Review, in 1945.

In 1934 he became a teacher in Cambridgeshire, where he met his wife, Ellen. After his wartime RAF service, they settled permanently in East Anglia and raised four children. In 1948 he gave up teaching and turned from writing fiction to producing a sheaf of studies, now regarded as classics, based on conversations with his elderly East Anglian neighbours- farm workers and rural craftsmen- from whom he acquired a wealth of knowledge about their vanishing customs, work habits and superstitions. His Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay (1956) marked him out as an original and sensitive interpreter of English rural life, and books like The Pattern Under the Plough (1966), Where Beards Wag All (1970), The Days That We Have Seen (1975), and From Mouths of Men (1976), in which he returned to the South Wales coalfield, established his reputation as a pioneer in the field of oral history.

He died in Brooke, on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, in 1988.

Short extract:

I first met the writer of Voices of the Children through Doctor Thomas, our local GP, to whom George Ewart Evans dedicated his oral history of mining life, From Mouths of Men. It happened in a round about way. I was stuck in the house recovering from an accident at work; I was watching too much television and complaining about it too much to Peggy, my wife. She suggested, not so politely, that if I thought I could do better I should write something myself. So I did. A friend typed it and we sent it to the BBC and, lo and behold, I was invited up to London to ‘discuss your script’. Doctor Thomas was delighted- he always believed in keeping his patients active- but because I was still under his care he was also concerned. It was March 1963, the whole country was frozen solid and I was still in a pretty fragile state. I had lost an eye in the accident. But I went anyway. The man I had to see at the BBC was Harry Green, a well known television script writer, from Neath. He met me at the reception.