Welsh stories
| Book cover | Book title and author | Book introduction | Websites for more information |
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Broken Ghost by Niall Griffiths |
A Welsh community is drawn together and blown apart by a strange vision in the mountains: the huge spectre of a woman floating over a ridge. The people who live here in these mountains already have their own demons - drink, drugs, domestic violence, psychoses - but each character has a different experience of this strange apparition, a different reaction, and for some it will change everything. Is it a collective hallucination? A meteorological phenomenon? Whatever it is, they all saw something, early one morning on the shores of a mountain lake, something that will awaken in them powers and passions and, perhaps, a possibility of healing these broken people in a broken country. |
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Never Greener by Ruth Jones |
Available in e-book Ruth Jones makes her debut with a witty and wise story of life's second chances and the dangers of taking them. With her trademark warmth, humanity and heart, she shows us the dangers of looking for something better, and forgetting that the best might not be in our past or yet to come - but right where we are now. |
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The Infinite by Patience Agbabi |
Available in e-audiobook We fight crime across time. Leaplings, children born on the 29th of February, are very rare. Rarer still are Leaplings with The Gift - the ability to leap through time. Elle has The Gift, but she's never used it. Until now. On her 12th birthday, Elle and her best friend Big Ben travel to the Time Squad Centre in 2048. Elle has received a mysterious warning from the future. Other Leaplings are disappearing in time - and not everyone at the centre can be trusted. Soon Elle's adventure becomes more than a race through time. It's a race against time. She must fight to save the world as she knows it - before it ceases to exist. |
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The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters |
There came the splash of water and the rub of heels as Mrs Barber stepped into the tub. After that there was a silence, broken only by the occasional echoey plink of drips from the tap. Frances had been picturing her lodgers in purely mercenary terms - as something like two great waddling shillings. But this, she thought, was what it really meant to have paying guests: this odd, unintimate proximity, this rather peeled-back moment, where the only thing between herself and a naked Mrs Barber was a few feet of kitchen and a thin scullery door. An image sprang into her head: that round flesh, crimsoning in the heat. |
An interview with Sarah Waters, author of The Paying Guests |
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The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies |
This novel traces a perilous wartime romance as it explores the bonds of love and duty that hold us to family, country, and ultimately, our fellow man. |
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Thinking Again by Jan Morris |
Available in e-book Necrophilia is not one of my failings, but I do like graveyards and memorial stones and such... Following the publication In My Mind's Eye, her acclaimed first volume of diaries, a Radio 4 Book of the Week in 2018, Jan Morris continued to write her daily musings. From her home in the North West of Wales, the author of classics such as Venice and Trieste cast her eye over modern life in all its stupidity and glory. From her daily thousand paces to the ongoing troubles of Brexit, from her enduring love for America to the wonders of the natural world, and from the vagaries and ailments of old age to the beauty of youth, she once again displays her determined belief in embracing life and creativity - all kindness and marmalade. |
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Last Tango in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce |
Available in e-book To Dean Morgan who taught at the Faculty of Undertaking, it was just a place to get course materials. But both worlds collide when the Dean checks into the notorious bed and breakfast ghetto and mistakenly receives a suitcase intended for a ruthless druid assassin. Soon he is running for his life, lost in a dark labyrinth of druid speakeasies and toffee apple dens, where every spinning wheel tells the story of a broken heart, and where the Dean's own heart is hopelessly in thrall to a porn star known as Judy Juice. |
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Resistance by Owen Sheers |
In an imagined alternative 1944, Sarah Lewis, a 26-year-old farmer's wife, wakes to find her husband has gone. She is not alone, as all the other women in the Welsh border valley of Olchon wake to discover their husbands have also disappeared. |
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The Man from St Petersburg by Ken Follett |
Available in e-book and e-audiobook The Man From St Petersburg is a dark tale of family secrets and political consequences. Ken Follett's masterful storytelling brings to life the danger of a world on the brink of war. It is just before the outbreak of World War I and Britain must enlist the aid of Russia. Czar Nicholas's nephew is to visit London for secret naval talks with Lord Walden, who has lived in Russia and has a Russian wife, Lydia. But there are other people who are interested in the arrival of Prince Alexei: the Waldens' only daughter, Charlotte - willful, idealistic, and with an awakening social conscience; Basil Thompson, head of the Special Branch; and, above all, Feliks Kschessinky, the ruthless Russian anarchist. No one could have foretold that Lydia should recognize Feliks, or that she might put her own daughter's life at risk for his sake. As the secret negotiations progress, the destinies of these characters become ineluctably enmeshed. And as Europe prepares for the catastrophe of war, the final private tragedy which will shatter the complacency of the Waldens is acted out. |
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According to YES by Dawn French |
The Foreign Land of the Very Wealthy - otherwise known as Manhattan's Upper East Side - has its own rigid code of behaviour. So when an unconventional thirty-eight-year-old primary school teacher from England bounces into their inflexible lives with a secret sorrow and a heart as big as the city, nobody realises she hasn't read the rule book. And for the Wilder-Bingham family, whose lives begin to unravel thread by thread, the consequences are explosive. |
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Do Not Disturb by Claire Douglas |
Could your dream home be your worst nightmare? After what happened in London, Kirsty needs a fresh start with her family. And running a guesthouse in the Welsh mountains sounds idyllic. But then their first guest arrives. Selena is the last person Kirsty wants to see. It's seventeen years since she tore everything apart. Why has she chosen now to walk back into Kirsty's life? Is Selena running from something too? Or is there an even darker reason for her visit? Because Kirsty knows that once you invite trouble into your home, it can be murder getting rid of it. |
Twelve of the best books set in Wales.
The best Welsh books of the decade.