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Set in a rural mining village in South Wales in the years leading up to the Second World War, this book recreates a magical but alive world that will resonate with our memories, real and imagined, of childhood.

Funny, lyrical and poignant, Shifts is a novel of the decline of industry and of the south Wales working class in the 1970s. It broke new ground on its appearance in combining a real, close-up depiction of work and ordinary lives with symbolic power and a wider imaginative reach. Jack Priday, down-at-heel and almost down and out, returns to his hometown towards the end of the 1970s after a decade's absence, just looking for a way to get by. His life becomes entangled with those of old friends Keith, Judith and O, and with the slow death throes of the male-dominated heavy industries that have shaped and defined the region and its people for almost two centuries. As circumstances shift around them, the principals are forced to find some understanding of them and to confront their own secret natures. From multiple viewpoints, Shifts is a slow-burning, controlled and intense examination of the relationship between our inner lives, the people around us and the forces of history.

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.

At the age of fifty, towards the end of the First World War, W. H. Davies decided that he must marry. Spurning London society and the literary circles where he had been lionised since the publication of his Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, he set about looking for the right partner on the streets of London.Young Emma is a moving and revealing memoir told with disarming honesty and humour. Davies records his life with three women: from his affair with Bella, the wife of a Sergeant Major, to his year-long liaison with the gentle Louise, to the turbulent brushes with a society woman who fears for her own life at his hands. He finally meets Emma, then pregnant, at a bus-stop on the Edgware Road. This is the story of their love affair.

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 brutish Easter Probert, groom to the oddly assorted Kilminster family. In a tale of passion, violence, cruelty and unexpected tenderness, Margiad Evans conjures a tempestous and sometimes sinister world of rural and small-town border life in the early twentieth century.

With a foreword by Phillip Pullman, Make Room for the Jester is a haunting journey from the edge of childhood into a threatening adult world.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 remarkable and welcome rediscovery.

In the first and, arguably, the finest of Hilda Vaughan's ten novels, the dawn of the twentieth century brings a new generation that clashes with the conservative traditionalism of an old Welsh way of life.Rhys Lloyd and his engagement with the ideas of Social Darwinism and the League of Nations make him a dangerous figure in the village. The son of a Welsh-speaking Nonconformist, his love for the church-going Esther reflects tensions that have long and bitterly divided the community. Most striking, however, is the stoic and determined Esther who calmly suffers the casual brutality of her agricultural upbringing, drawing on an inner strength and organic spirituality that would provide an archetype for Vaughan's later heroines. Despite a loving and sensitive depiction of her native Radnorshire landscape, Vaughan offers no rural idyll.The Battle to the Weak is a vividly drawn, socially engaged portrait of a small rural Welsh community with an awareness of its context within the wider world.

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.

Alun Richards casts his baleful eye on the central valleys of twentieth-century South Wales from the 1930s to the 1970s, the personal relationships and social ambitions of the inhabitants of this much-fabled country. Includes the best of his short stories, as funny and savage as they are scathing and compassionate, combined with his entrancing autobiographical memoir Days of Absence.

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.

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.

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 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.

Through his letters home and six short stories, Alun Lewis paints a vibrant picture of life in India as a British serviceman during World War II. Intimate, vivid, observational, and always filled with emotion, this is a rare literary example of one Welshman's experience of empire and war.

Hannah Ellis is 35, unmarried, and still living at Y Glyn, the family farm in Wales where she has been brought up by her mother and step-father--a forbidding man with a powerful hold on the neighborhood. Loving her country yet resenting the egotism of her family, she yearns for the return of her long-banished brother Philip, believing that he will rescue her from this bleak existence. Little does Hannah realize that Philip's arrival is imminent and will herald enormous changes as he unwittingly ignites the passions and strengths of an unusually intertwined community.

A Time to Laugh is set in a coal-mining valley on the eve of the 20th century against a background of industrial unrest and social change.The old certainties of pastoral Rhondda have given way to a new age of capital and steam, and life in the Valley has been transformed by strike, riot and gruelling poverty. Tudor Morris, a young doctor, has returned to the valley where his father has a practice, and is immediately drawn into the tumult and excitement of the fight for fair pay and conditions. He is expected to marry his childhood sweetheart Mildred, the daughter of a local solicitor but he is inexorably drawn to the passionate ideals and charms of Daisy, the sister of one of the leaders of the workers movement. Is Tudor going to follow the conventions of his class or break with tradition or gamble his life and future with the fortunes of the struggle of the people?

Featuring the first volume in the "Library of Wales" series, this book recounts the story of a boxer from Cymmer in south Wales ready to make his comeback. Abe has ensured Hector is nurtured into a single-minded fighting machine. He is ready to take on the world, but where do the true dangers lie.

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 1960's. Sea and harbour, mountain and monastery, her neighbours and friends are unforgettably pictured; these were the reality outside herself while within there was a conflict of emotion and warring desires. Joy and woe are woven fine in this record: the delight of a multitude of fresh experiences thronging to the senses, the suffering from which she emerges with new understanding of herself and human existence. Both in the intensity and force of the writing and the eloquent island drawings, A Rope of Vines - Journal from a Greek Island is a distinguished achievement.

We Live takes up Len's tale, in which he is influenced by Mary, a teacher, and the Communist Party, which becomes central to his work both underground and in union politi, and to his decision to leave and fight in the Spanish Civil War.

The village of Tanygraig on the Welsh-English border is the setting for this passionate novel of love and its consequences. Beti, the beautiful and wilful daughter of a pub landlord, is pursued by two men: Llew, her aggressive, red-haired cousin, and Evan, the dreamy 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.In this enduring novel by Geraint Goodwin, first published in 1936, Wales is associated with tradition and stability, England connotes modernity and movement. Beti is conscious of living at a temporal border: 'The old way of things was ending; she had come at the end of one age and the beginning of another. Wales would be the last to go but it was going...'

Sex, murder, and a devastating, humour mark these three novellas that Gwyn Thomas wrote in 1946. Death, exploitation, and evil abound, and in The Dark philosophers itself, the grimly humorous philosophers gather in an Italian cafe to tell a tragic tale of revenge and manslaughter.

A worker is killed in the striking coalfields of south Wales. Some months later a government minister suspected of being connected with the death is shot. Lewis Redfern, once a radical, now a political analyst and journalist, pursues the killer, a lonely hunt that leads him through a maze of government leaks and international politics to a secret organization: a source of insurrection far more powerful than anyone could have suspected. A compelling thriller, The Volunteers is also an engrossing reminder of the conflict between moral choice and political loyalty for through his obsessive pursuit of justice, Redfern finally encounters the truth about himself.

Offers the underlying meaning of South Wales' history. This title, with its plural narration, presents a choric commentary on human illusion and knowledge, on power and its attendant deprivation, on dreams and their destruction. It is History as Carnival and a comic vision of humanity that recognises no geographical boundaries.

The Hill of Dreams is the story of a young man's quest for beauty through literature, love and, finally, the spiritual alchemy of drugs and dreams. It is widely regarded as Arthur Machen's finest work.

Widely acclaimed for its warm humour, lyricism and honesty, as well as its accurate evocation of the thirties, Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve has become a sought after classic.In this delightful autobiographical novel, Dannie Abse skilfully interweaves public and private themes, setting the fortunes of a Jewish family in Wales against the troubled backcloth of the times - unemployment, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and the Spanish Civil War.

An experiment into the sources of the human brain through the mind of a young woman has gone horribly wrong. She has seen the great god Pan and will die giving birth to a daughter.Twenty years later feted society hostess Helen Vaughan becomes the source of much fevered speculation. Many men are infatuated with her beauty, but great beauty has a price, sometimes you have to pay with the only thing you have left.The Great God Pan was a sensation when first published in 1894. Its author, Arthur Machen, was a struggling unknown writer living in London. He had translated Casanova's memoirs and was living on a small inheritance. He immediately became one of the most talked-about writers of the last years of the nineteenth century, while the publication marked the start of his ongoing influence on modern fantasy and horror.Machen's dark imaginings of the reality behind ancient beliefs feature again in the acclaimed, mesmerising short story 'The White People' and the curious tale 'The Shining Pyramid', also in this volume.

These sharp, ironic and compelling stories are perfect hard gems of observationabout the truths of everyday life: kindness and friendship balance precariouslywith obsession and desire.

'...the greatest account of trench warfare....' --Phil Carradice, BBCArguably 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.In this remarkable tale, Richards recounts life in the trenches as a member of the famous Royal Welch Fusiliers, with all its death and camaraderie, in graphic detail, vividly bringing to life the trials and tribulations faced by the ordinary rank and file.

From the author of the celebrated Great War memoir

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 Country is Raymond Williams finest novel.