New Titles
By Seren
New Titles
By Seren
Just You and the Page: Encounters with Twelve Writers
Sue Gee
£12.99 £12.34Just You and the Page opens in 1971, with the dramatist Michael Wall hammering out his plays on a portable typewriter. It concludes in 2020, when the novelist and academic Josie Barnard is teaching students to compose novels on Instagram. Between them are Booker prize winners; a poet whose life was changed by a profound religious conversion; a translator for whom Pushkin has meant everything; a distinguished environmental journalist; a famous diarist; a nature writer who restored a wood, and a political activist who fled her country and is writing now in exile. Sue Gee has interviewed twelve distinctively different writers, all old friends, looking at what has shaped them: at struggle, inspiration and dedication to their art. Part memoir, part literary biography, published in extraordinary times, Just You and the Page is above all about resilience.
Japan Stories
Jayne Joso
£9.99 £9.49Jayne Joso's spellbinding collection of short fiction 'Japan Stories' creates a mosaic of life in contemporary Japan, its people, its society, its thinking, its character. As we get realy for the Tokyo Olympics, Japan Stories provides a window into a country we would all love to know more deeply. With illustrations by Manga artist Namiko.
Fatal Solution
Leslie Scase
£9.99 £9.49In this new mystery Inspector Chard is confronted with another murder in bustling Victorian Pontypridd. On the face of it the case appears unremarkable, even if it isn’t obviously solvable, but following new leads takes Chard into unexpected places. A second murder, a sexual predator, industrial espionage and a mining disaster crowd into the investigation, baffling the Inspector and his colleagues and putting his own life at risk as the murderer attempts to avoid capture. Atmospheric, authentic, Chard and the reader are left guessing until the final page.
Please
Christopher Meredith
£9.99 £9.49Octogenarian language geek Vernon, who has never written anything longer than a memo, struggles to write the story of his strange marriage. A verbally dazzling tragicomedy about hidden passion and regret.
Still
Christopher Meredith
£9.99 £9.49Renowned poet/novelist Christopher Meredith’s new poetry collection Still, uses the title word as a fulcrum to balance various paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. Lively and thought-provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, humane and intelligent collection.
TROEON : TURNINGS
Philip Gross, Cyril Jones, et al.
£12.99 £12.34Troeon : Turnings is a creative conversation, in Welsh and English, between two renowned poets, Philip Gross and Cyril Jones. Also featured are text designs by artist Valerie Coffin Price. Various rivers run through this work: amongst them, in Gross’s case, the Taff, the Severn in south Wales, and in Jones’s the Arth and the Glasffrwd in west Wales.
Real Cambridge
Grahame Davies
£9.99 £9.49Cambridge, ancient academic centre and fenland community, science/tech centre and centre of radical religious and political thinking, home to grand museums and agricultural cottages. With an American war cemetery, folk festival, iron age fort, evensong and Pink Floyd, it is a place alone as former student Grahame Davies finds on his return.
Inhale/Exile
Abeer Ameer
£9.99 £9.49Inhale/Exile is the debut poetry collection by Abeer Ameer. Inspired by the many stories she heard as a child and visiting family in Iraq as an adult, Ameer has written a book that celebrates the resilience of her forebears and extended family in Baghdad and around the world. The book presents a range of characters in a mixture of political and personal poems; ordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances. Formally diverse, using both traditional and experimental methods, these poems are also full of empathy and suffused with a quietly persistent faith.
Restorations
Rosalind Hudis
£9.99 £9.49Restorations is a journey into what it means to preserve – a monument, a moment, a life-story, a poppy. It’s about the hunger to possess and the need to let go. Welding themes from art and history with the contemporary, there are poems about pigments and dictators, glue and glass houses, collections, crinolines, and barometers, and the vagaries of memory itself. Entwined, is a more personal story that tracks the loss of a parent to dementia. Also running through, is a theme of women eroding the straitjacket of gendered roles: we meet a variety of characters including the explorer, Isabella Bird, and the nineteenth century navigator Sarah Jane Rees (Cranogwen) who lived in Llangrannog in Ceredigion. Linking all is a play with colour, particularly blue, in all its stages from vital to decayed.
Lockdown Wales: How Covid-19 Tested Wales
Will Hayward
£9.99 £9.49The first lockdown in Wales was one of the most significant events in recent Welsh history. Will Hayward records some of the personal hardships and difficulties suffered by Welsh people. He also explores the positive ways people responded to their situation, and how the Welsh government managed the crisis.
Elaine Morgan: A Life Behind the Screen
Daryl Leeworthy
£9.99 £9.49Daryl Leeworthy's brand new biography celebrates the achievements of pioneering television writer, evolutionary anthropologist and political activist Elaine Morgan, reestablishing her position as a significant figure in the canon of English language writing from Wales.
Let Me Tell You What I Saw: Extracts from Uruk's Anthem
Adnan al-Sayegh
£12.99 £12.34Let Me Tell You What I Saw is the first ever publication as a dual-language (English/Arabic) text of substantial extracts from Adnan Al-Sayegh’s ground-breaking epic poem, Uruk’s Anthem, one of the longest poems ever written in Arabic literature, which gives voice to the profound despair of the Iraqi experience. This superb translation by Jenny Lewis brings the eloquent original Arabic epic to a new readership.
The Stromness Dinner
Peter Benson
£9.99 £9.49Ed Beech is one half of Beech Building Services. He’s based in Bermondsey but no job’s too small, no distance too great. So when he’s asked to do some work on a house in Orkney, he loads the van with paint, tools and sandwiches, and takes off. He gets nervous around farm animals and large ships, and he’s never been so far north, but when he’s joined by Claire, his client’s city banker sister, he discovers that in Stromness, anything is possible.
A City Burning
Angela Graham
£9.99 £9.49In the twenty-six stories in A City Burning, set in Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy, children and adults face, in the flames of personal tragedy, moments of potential transformation. With a virtuoso control of tone, by turns elegiac, comic, lyrical, philosophical, A City Burning examines power of all types, exploring conflicts between political allegiances; between autonomy and intimacy; emotional display and concealment; resistance versus acceptance. The result is a deeply human book full of hauntingly memorable characters and narratives.
The Amazingly Astonishing Story
Lucy Gannon
£12.99 £12.34By turns laugh out loud funny and deeply sad, The Amazingly Astonishing Story is award-winning TV writer Lucy Gannon's childhood memoir, a frank and surprising look into a child’s tumultuous mind. "The saddest happiest funniest book I’ve read for ages..." – Dawn French.
Lime, Lemon & Sarsaparilla
Colin Hughes
£9.99 £9.49Lime, Lemon & Sarsaparilla is a wonderful evocation of Italian immigration in south Wales from the turn of the century to the postwar years, when the Italian café was central to life in many small communities in the Valleys. This first detailed book on the subject follows the fortunes of Italian families such as Rabaiotti, Berni, Bracchi, Conti, Fulgoni, Sidoli and many others, and explores their influence on Welsh society. Fully illustrated with contemporary photographs, and with a Foreword by the Welsh-Italian actor Victor Spinetti, Lime, Lemon & Sarsaparilla is a revealing history of our recent past.
Miriam, Daniel and Me
Euron Griffith
£9.99 £9.49When Miriam fell in love with Padraig life seemed simple. But soon she discovered that love is a treacherous business. Everything changed when she met Daniel. She was taken down an unexpected path which would dictate and dominate the rest of her life. Spanning three generations of a North Wales family in a Welsh-speaking community, Miriam, Daniel and Me is an absorbing and compelling story of family discord, political turmoil, poetry, jealousy…and football.
The Estate Agent's Daughter
Rhian Edwards
£9.99 £9.49The Estate Agent’s Daughter is Rhian Edwards’ eagerly awaited follow-up to her multi-prizewinning debut Clueless Dogs. Her voice is both powerfully personal, local to her Bridgend birthplace, and performative, born to be read aloud. In the title poem, the protagonist has become a surrealist house, with dream-like details ‘carpeted with sycamore seeds and cherry blossom throughout’; the sturdy realism of a writing desk ‘nudged/ to the brink of the bay’, as well as points of sharp irony: ‘all mod cons’. This poem foreshadows both the heartbreak (a shattered first marriage) and joy (the birth of a daughter), that feature in the work that follows. We also have pieces of sly irony, of disillusioned dating. There is an engaging diptych devoted to a recently deceased grandmother and grandfather, who died within months of each other, whose vivid personalities with all their tragicomic elements, shine through. The author combines her visceral skill for description, for these are poems based in the body, with a feminist forthright courage to speak of difficult things.
Wild Persistence
Katrina Naomi
£9.99 £9.49Katrina Naomi’s poetry collection, Wild Persistence, written after a move from London to Cornwall, considers distance and closeness, and questions how to live. She dissects ‘dualism’ and arrival, sex and dance, a trip to Japan. There is a strong section of poems about the aftermath of an attempted rape. Her voice is convincing and contemporary.
The Seasonal Vegan
Sarah Philpott
£12.99 £12.34The Seasonal Vegan is a kitchen diary of seasonal recipes with a delicious mixture of fine food writing and beautiful photography. This guide to eating with the seasons takes a realistic approach to shopping cheaply and sustainably and proves that the vegan lifestyle is anything but expensive. Philpott tells us how and when to find the right food, for environmental reasons and nutrition values. The Seasonal Vegan features recipes for all seasons, with a section featuring dishes that can be enjoyed all year round, and menu ideas for special occasions. There are 70 recipes, each of which includes a diary entry.
The Shaking City
Cath Drake
£9.99 £9.49The shaking city of Australian poet Cath Drake’s debut poetry collection is a metaphor for the swiftly changing precarity of modern life within the looming climate and ecological emergency, and the unease of the narrator who is far from home. Tall tales combine with a conversational style, playful humour and a lyrical assurance.​ The poet is able to work a wide set of diverse spells upon the reader through her adept use of tone, technique, plot and form. She is a welcome new voice for contemporary poetry.
We Could Be Anywhere By Now
Katherine Stansfield
£9.99 £9.49Katherine Stansfield has made a name for herself both as a wryly witty poet of the everyday seen ‘aslant’ and as a popular novelist of crime and fantasy. Her second poetry collection, We Could Be Anywhere by Now, is pointedly full of poems about placement and displacement. After a childhood on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, she moved to mid Wales, and this book explores relationships between these two places along personal and linguistic lines, as well as notions of insider / outsider in Wales and England, learning languages, and the languages of learning to leave places behind. New horizons beckon: we voyage to Italy, Canada, the United States. Stansfield is never eager to pronounce but always approaches her subjects in an oblique, artful way, carefully avoiding cliché and relishing the strange, the overheard, the marginal, the accidental comedy and tragedy of the everyday.
Bloodlines
Sarah Wimbush
£5.00 £4.75Bloodlines is an exploration of Sarah Wimbush's own Gypsy/Traveller heritage, a journey made by piecing together fragments of distant stories and a scattered language. Along the way, we meet people who are 'tethered to the seasons'; voices that reverberate with a sense of family and resilience, and always with that constant wonder of being part of something colourful, untamed and rare.
The Machineries of Joy
Peter Finch
£9.99 £9.49The Machineries of Joy is the vibrant, uproarious, pointed & wildly entertaining new collection from renowned Cardiff-based performance poet, Peter Finch. Known for his inventive and multi-faceted formal strategies & his best-selling psycho-geographical peregrinations around Wales and the USA, he gives us the world in all its contemporary complexity.
Blood Rain
Andre Mangeot
£9.99 £9.49André Mangeot’s first collection for Seren, Blood Rain, is partly inspired by his love of the Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia. Beautifully crafted, these poems address the natural world, its endangerment and other pressing global issues from multiple perspectives, and with great lyrical power.
