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...

Arthur Machen unfurls the tale of a young girl cursed and pursued by her supernatural parentage to become a creature of shape-shifting, polysexual, demi-god evil.

A young man's quest for beauty through literature, love, drugs and dreams becomes a mystical, lyrical classic from the father of supernatural horror.

In this classic masterpiece, originally published in 1968, dysfunctional lovers Rees Stevens and Ellen Vaughan must uncover and interpret Ellen's father's journal in order to make sense of their own lives. Faulknerian in its range, hard driven in its narrative telling, singular in style, and fierce in its moral thrust, this richly complex novel uses the fictional sieve of Caib Colliery and the village of Daren to give meaning to the kaleidoscopic history of all of the South Wales valleys over the last century.

A new edition of a classic originally published in 1964, this is a journal of love, romance, and discord in 1950s postwar Germany. As Welsh artist and poet Elizabeth Greatorex travels with her French husband to meet her former lover Klaus, a German count, she maps a 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 while considering her own mythologized past and real, diminished present. This fascinating story pits creative idealism, emotional hunger, and...

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...

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.

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.