Niall Griffiths

A visionary novel from the edge of the world. 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. An examination of modern humanity's desperate need to live meaningfully and vividly in a mediated world - where individual autonomy is lost and the collective heart is atomised and exploited - this is a novel that gives voices to the marginalised, the dispossessed, the forgotten. Disturbing and unforgettable, darkly funny and deeply moving, written in a charged language that is vernacular, lyrical and hieratic all at once, Broken Ghost is - simultaneously - a howl of anguish and a summoning of gods. 'Combines myth, drug culture and iconoclastic political vision in a wild music that's also a call to arms. This important book outstrips even its own virtuoso literary technique' New Statesman

Broken Ghost

Jan Morris

Caradog Prichard

Philip Mitchell

One Moonlit Night

Robbed of his ancestral home - a near-derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales - Ianto pledges revenge on the English yuppies who have turned his grandmother's cottage into a weekenders' barbecue party and on all those who have violated the land that is his. This latest act of colonial oppression and desecration triggers his lurid and strange imagination into unspeakable savagery.

Sheepshagger

In the late 1990s, a group of young drifters find themselves together on the coast of Wales. They explore and attempt to overcome the yearnings and addictions that brought them this place: promiscuity, drugs, petty crime, and the angry search for the meaning.

Grits

Depicts the tempestuous love story of two lower middle class young people from Liverpool.

Kelly + Victor

A bar in Liverpool January 2nd 200: VICTOR meets a girl. Some time later that night he is in her bed. This, he thinks, is the best sex he's ever had. KELLY meets a boy. Some time later that night he is in her bed. This, she thinks, is the best sex she's ever had. So the story of Kelly + Victor progresses, through two mirror-image narratives: a story of the growth and spiralling intensity of sexual obsession, traced to its inevitable, devastating conclusion. Set against a backdrop of urban despair, spiritual absence and a world swamped with pornography, this is a novel about yearning for union, for purity, and for magic and mystery in a world that denies them all. And it is, above everything, a love story - or all that 21st century Britain will allow of one.

While possessing all the characteristic passion and anger we have come to expect of this major new literary voice, there is also the relief of black farce and a move towards a sense of regeneration and hope.

Stump

On leaving school a 16 year old boy goes to live with his uncle on a remote Welsh hill-farm. His aunt has recently committed suicide after losing her livestock in the foot-and-mouth epidemic and his uncle has turned, once again, to the bottle. The boy is an innocent, a spiritual savant, his uncle sees him as a shaman.

Runt

On leaving school a sixteen-year-old boy goes to live with his uncle on a remote Welsh hill-farm. His aunt has recently committed suicide after losing her livestock in the foot-and-mouth epidemic and his uncle has turned, once again, to the bottle. The boy is a spiritual savant: an unwitting repository of folk memory from the margins, barely educated but possessed of extraordinary insights; barely literate but able to speak a language of his own - a poetry laden with Pagan and Christian myth. He is unaware that he is gifted and unaware of what he knows. But during one of his ecstatic trances, the boy learns that he has an appointed role in the world, which he must discover for himself. During an episode of brutal and climactic violence, he does exactly that. Told through the boy's internal monologue of beauty and damage, Runt is a powerful, disturbing and moving novel that reinvigorates the language of fiction and illuminates domestic tragedy with a penetrating epic light.

Peter Finch

This guidebook provides a remarkable overview of the Welsh town Aberystwyth--a community of two languages that contains a university, a farming community, a port-turned-marina, the National Library of Wales, provides a home for writers and spies alike, and was also made recently famous--or infamous--by Malcolm Pryce’s novels. The travel guide details an enthralling account of a city that is any number of conflicting and complimentary things--from its medieval beginnings through its Victorian heyday to the fluid mix of longstanding natives, large student population, and colony of those who came and never left. Mixing autobiography with topography, aligning the oblique approach with historical report, and contrasting the prosaic with the downright odd, this study paints a vivid picture of a world-famous town.

Real Aberystwyth

Follows the misadventures of Ianto, a Welsh ignoble savage and genius loci of questionable ancestry and a lurid imagination, who pledges revenge against those responsible for taking away his family home, a near-derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales.

A Novel

Iraq-bound young squaddie Ronnie takes something dodgy and falls asleep for three nights in a filthy hovel where he has the strangest of dreams. He watches the tattoed tribes of modern Britain assemble to speak with a grinning man playing war games. Arthurian legend merges with its twenty-first century counterpart in a biting commentary on leadership, individualism and the divisions in British society. Meanwhile Cardiff gangsta Max is fed up with life in his favourite nightclub, Rome, and chases a vision of the perfect woman in far flung parts of his country.

The Dreams of Max & Ronnie

20 Years of Words

Red Roar

Sixteen-year-old Grace has dreams, and she knows how to make them come true: a little silicone and surgery here and there –nose, breasts, lips, hair, teeth, nails. Then with the right clothes and a new tan she’ll be ready: ready to be seen, consumed and adored by millions. Grace will become a celebrity. Someone, though, remembers her as an ordinary, pretty schoolgirl living in a rural paradise: a place of simple, natural beauty. When he sees how utterly Grace has changed, he realises how far the world has fallen since those days. The collision of their two lives, their two very different trajectories, can only end in catastrophe.

A Great Big Shining Star

Everything goes wrong from the start. The money's been stolen from the remote North Wales post office, but Darren's been over-enthusiastic with the lump hammer. The elderly sub-postmistress lies in a coma. When Darren and Alastair get back to Liverpool only to have the money stolen from them- when a consignment of pure cocaine is added to the mix, along with some seriously dangerous criminals - things really get out of hand, and stay that way until the story finally crashes to its grisly conclusion.

Wreckage

Robbed of his ancestral home - a near-derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales - Ianto pledges revenge not only on the English yuppies who have turned his grandmother's cottage into a weekenders' barbecue party but on all those who have violated him and the land that is his. This latest act of colonial oppression and desecration triggers his lurid and strange imagination into unspeakable savagery - embodying our most primal fears of physical threat, a world beyond our control.

Niall Griffiths

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