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Publication date May 2010

In the South Wales town of Cwmtaff Shelly Bush, a fiery, intelligent girl whose mother died of a drug overdose leaving her at the mercy of harsh ‘care’ system; Sam Taylor, who seems adept only at getting life wrong and Mary Croft, a gifted A level student who feels alienated from her father, after the death of her mother and betrayed by her boyfriend find their stories coming together as insists on hope and rebellion in the face of overwhelming odds. Sharp, funny, fast paced and precisely executed The Fugitive Three is a dazzling display of dialect, plot and characters who, despite their flaws, are completely believable and eminently likeable.

“….narrated in a clipped, cartoon-like manner, blunt and humorous… The Fugitive Three is about isolation and the loss of the mother. It concerns the indifference (and worse) of society and shows how youngsters may be scarred but still possess a razor-edge resilience that can help them survive their wasted lives.”

John Pikoulis

Publication dates: May 2010

Elaine Walker brings to this debut novel the keen eye for detail of an academic and non-fiction writer, but transforms her material with a story teller’s sensibility.

Set on a remote Scottish island after a strange ecological disaster which has left the world largely devoid of human life this is the story of Jo and his family, marooned during a family holiday and now facing personal as well as global tragedy, yet with a connection to the mysterious horses who’s coming heralds rebirth and a new way of life.

This powerful first person narrative uses magical realism to stunning effect to tell a story that is as compelling as it is important. A highly accomplished debut novel.

Elaine Walker has lived in North Wales all her life and has been a freelance writer since 1997. Her work includes fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Much of her non-fiction is concerned with equestrian history and culture, in particular her book, Horse (Reaktion Books, 2008). As a fiction writer, she is particularly interested in magical realism and storytelling which is not bounded by reality. She has a doctorate in English Literature and her academic work on early modern horsemanship manuals crosses into her interest in the fantastic in the lives and writing of the first Duke and Duchess of Newcastle. Elaine lectures for the Open University, the University of Wales and the Open College of the Arts. She runs online writing courses and is an Academi Mentor.

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February 2010

Welsh poet and African scholar launches stunning novel

Matriarchy and the threads that unite disparate women across centuries and cultures weave through this powerful, innovative novel to make this one of the most gripping stories of the year. Landeg White brings a lifetime of scholarship and lyricism to bear on this epic, but intensely personal story of a young woman’s search for identity and the realisation that ancestory is not always as it seems and the blood that links us can flow between continents.

Maria, a student in Brighton, begins to piece together her family history during a dull Christmas visit to her grandmother and after buying an African carving that she someone can’t resist. Discovering that Caroline, the long suffering colonial wife who’s letters are still safely kept was not her great-grandmother at all, Maria begins of journey of discovery that pieces together the disparate narratives that weave through this rich and intelligent novel; a journey that draws together ‘people who cared not for nation or tribe but for the infinitely varied networks that were our common inheritance.‘

Landeg White was born in South Wales in 1940. He taught at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad, where he was chief arranger for a steel band; in the University of Malawi, from where he was deported in 1972; in the University of Sierra Leone, where he wrote the detective novel Inspector Tucker & the Leopard Men, and in the University of Zambia, where he was teaching when his first book V.S. Naipaul: a Critical Introduction, appeared. The second third was played out at the University of York where he joined the Centre for Southern African Studies in 1980, becoming Director in 1984. Here he wrote two Mozambican histories, the history of a village in Malawi, a study of southern Africa praise poetry, an anthology of African oral poetry (co-authored with Jack Mapanje) and three collections of his own poetry.Since 1994, he has lived in Portugal where he teaches at the Universidade Aberta (Open University). Here, he has published a prize-winning translation of Camões’ The Lusiads, and four further collections of poetry, including Where the Angolans are Playing Football: Selected and New Poems and Arab Work. The Collected Lyrics of Luis de Camoes was published by Princeton University Press in August (2008).

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Publication date November 2009

1860s London: a period of discovery, competing ideas and rigid social hierarchy.

When Alice Heapy, an unusual and artistic young milliner, daringly sets up her own business, the mother of John Motton, eminent phrenologist, is amongst the first of her bourgeois and eccentric clients. Alice is intrigued by the phrenologist’s belief that he can determine his clients’ character and moral capacity by measuring their heads, whilst Motton is astonished at the power Alice’s poetic hats exert on the lives of his mother and her peculiar friends. But under each other’s exacting and increasingly hostile gaze, Alice and Motton begin to reveal—and, in desperation, attempt to conceal—their own characters.

As Alice and Motton play out the ferocious Victorian tensions between social classes, men and women, science and art, faith and reason—tensions which continue to challenge us—we are drawn into the sensuous imagery and subtle humour of this sharply observed drama, eager to know where it will lead.

A highly original and visual novel, brimming with delicious wit, The Milliner and the Phrenologist is a remarkable debut from Kay Syrad.

Kay Syrad is a lecturer and freelance writer, often working with visual artists. Her poetry has been published in a wide range of journals and anthologies. She is particularly interested in the nature of perception, which she explores in her poetry publication Objects of Colour: Baltic Coast, in collaboration with photographer Gina Glover. She is also co-author of a Thames & Hudson monograph, Silent Spaces, on the artist Chris Drury. She lives in East Sussex.

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Ring of Stones Marianne Jones £8.99 UK delivery, £9.99 elsewhere

Publication date october 2009

Ynys Môn poet and short story writer launches award winning first novella

Growing up on a remote Scottish island Ceit is torn between possibilities that offer progress and escape, but threaten the fragile traditional existence that has been her world. The struggle to maintain the island’s identity, language and culture seems inextricably linked with disturbing facts about the high infant mortality rate in Ceit’s traditional community and the use of domestic violence against those who question too much. Are outsiders like the Moores, the school teachers, merely a threat to the local language and harbingers of an empire that no-one wants to be part of or can Ceit find a way to bring together disparate worlds and discover her own identity in the process?

“This novella makes for a compelling read... vividly evoked through meticulous attention to detail throughout this story. I thoroughly enjoyed this novella and applaud its characterisation, evocation of place and period, and thematic richness.”

Fiona Owen

Marianne Jones was born shortly before the end of World War 2 and grew up on Ynys Môn/Anglesey, where she now lives with her husband, an environmental campaigner. After completing a first degree and qualifying as a teacher, she lived and worked abroad for several years: in Kyushu, Tokyo, Vancouver and Montreal. When she arrived back in Britain, she worked as a lecturer/teacher of English as a second language and later as co-ordinator of Japanese educational projects. She completed a second MA (the first was in Montreal) and a postgraduate diploma in multicultural education.

Cardiff author Holly Howitt launches her debut novella, The Schoolboy – shocking and brilliant

Following the success of her sharply observed microfiction collection, Dinner Time, Holly Howitt delivers another book marked by its intelligence, wit and disturbing candour. The Schoolboy is not for the faint hearted. The narrative follows Nick in his last year at school. Plagued by secrets, self doubt, guilt and fury, the flaws in his character inevitably lead him into the hands of the damaged, unscrupulous and malevolent.

Holly Howitt was born in Wales, and has lived in and about it all her life. She writes fiction in various forms, and is particularly interested in truncated and overlooked genres, such as microfiction and the novella. She has contributed to anthologies and collections both in print and online. She lives in Cardiff and takes inspiration from her noisy neighbours and late nights. She is completing a PhD in creative writing at Cardiff University. Her highly acclaimed microfiction collection, Dinner Time, was launched at the Guardian Hay Festival in 2008. She is currently editing an anthology of microfiction for Cinnamon Press and is working on a second novella.

Colleen is fifteen, unpredictable, unreliable and violent. She’s also gifted. And now she’s on her way to Wales for a special residential course for talented youth. An American psychologist wants to unlock her potential, help her become the person that she’s always dreamt of being. God help Wales. God help us all.

Jonathan Diamond is forty-one. Looks a bit like Tom Cruise and he’s going to Wales too. A failed musician and a recovering alcoholic he’s now an Advanced Skills Teacher and he’ll be in loco parentis for the week. Together the two of them develop an unlikely and dangerous alliance as they are forced to confront difficult truths about themselves.

Part bleakly comic confession, part twisted romance, at heart an elegy for dreams that refuse to die, TAG is the fast-moving, at times shocking, story of two lives turned upside down by reckless moments and impulses that won’t be denied. Full of wit, drama and an eye for the absurdities of the way we live now, TAG is a memorable debut novel.

Stephen May is a former barman, warehouseman and teacher. He is Director of the Ted Hughes Arvon Centre at Lumb Bank.

“Though TAG is not a teenage novel any more than Catcher In The Rye is, the vivacity and iconoclasm of Colleen will surely particularly appeal to young adult readers in the way that Holden Caulfield did, while Jonathan Diamond’s weary stoicism in the face of a world he is beginning not to understand should resonate with all ages. Both characters are the kind that get under your skin, and by the end of the book you find yourself rooting for them both.”

Ray French, author of Going Under.

Published in March 2010

Purchase includes free copy of Adnan's short story collection refugee

Mahmutović 's writing is lucid and beautiful. Told in the first person voice of a young woman coming of age as her country falls into war and hatred, the deceptively simple narrative takes the reader on a journey across landscape, political boundaries, assumptions and emotions. The impact is powerful and evocative, the voices authentic, speaking for themselves free of heavy handed authorial intrusion. Full of poignancy without a hint of self-pity; truth without a hint of preaching the novella is a gripping read, a challenging page turner that will establish Mahmutović as one of the leading writers of his generation.

Adnan Mahmutović was born in 1974 in Banja Luka, northern Bosnia and moved to Sweden as a refugee in 1993. He lives in Stockholm, where he is finishing a PhD in English literature. Adnan worked as a personal aid to a man in a wheelchair for 11 years. After his friend died, he took the position of a manager for a group of 10 people who take care of a teenager with special needs. He describes himself as “ a Bosnian exile in beautiful and calm Sweden, the land whose naked north glistens with green Northern Lights”.

After the hippies and before the yuppies, between the advent of The Pill and the onset of AIDS, between the ‘summer of love’ and the ‘winter of discontent’, the newest game in town was sex.

In mid-seventies London a group of friends play a dangerous game of open marriages, secrets and lies. “It’s only sex, Ann. It won’t hurt us,” claims Lois, beautiful, talented and determined to get whatever or whoever she wants without being held back by her long-suffering, academic husband, Hugh. In homes and offices, at parties, on holidays, wherever they are, sex is there for the taking. But bed-hopping carries a price. Can love be free? Truth Games bares all. It’s fast, funny and sexy, but as the summer heat increases, stakes are raised and consequences have to be faced...

Bobbie Darbyshire lives in Clapham. Her second novel, Love, Revenge & Buttered Scones, comes out in February 2010.  She won the 2008 fiction prize at the National Academy of Writing and has been published in their anthology, Finding a Voice, and by Mslexia. She has worked as barmaid, mushroom picker, film extra, maths coach, cabinet minister's private secretary, and as a care assistant, as well as in social research and government policy. She hosts a writers' group and is a volunteer adult-literacy teacher.

When Owen and Jan take their three children on holiday in North Wales their life as a family is already unravelling. As relationships are made and broken a carefully pieced patchwork of events unfolds; seen from the different perspectives of parents and children, each sealed in with their own perceptions. Years pass and the family meet again on holiday in South Wales. As the pattern of relationships shift and family secrets are revealed, new resolutions must be negotiated.

“The spirit of the book is a resilient dark comedy – ... the effect is convincing and moving. The writing is careful, alert and subtle.”

Ambitious and sophisticated.”

Tessa Hadley

Hiya, I’m Dai Dando. From up the Coeca estate in Ponty. Working down year in Cardiff at the Gwalia. We do sell mortgages, see. They do call me Dave in work. Clive Hourahane’s my best mate. Bit of a tosser but e’s ok. I got a poncy brother called Steve who’s a lecturer up England way. Mam and Nanna still live on the Coeca but I got this grotty flat in Landaff North. They do always call me David. I do go out most nights for a few bevvies with the lads, mostly to The Plough in Whitchurch. Then we go on the pull in the clubs. Nah, aven’t ad any since comin back from Lanzarotty. That Eleri Vaughan Jones was somethin else though. Ad an ead on er, she did. Called me Dafydd. Nearly ad it off with er up on the Garth. I dunno about er, mind. I carn make er out, see. Er mother’s nice enough, but a bit posh, like. Er usband was somethin igh-up in the Welsh Office. Speak Welsh they do, like that poxy Peredur, my line-manager, a North Walian git who carn pronounce the letter z. Nah, I don speak it, but I gorra O level in it. An I’m keen on local istory. Lot of Welsh in Cardiff these days, too royal there is. Anyway, this is all about me. It’s a kinda diary for twelve days late last summer. We do all tell stories, don we? Well, this is my story. It’s Dai Dando’s story. Yeah, Dai Dando.

'Here the present in all its hip and contemporary glory sparkles off the page. How can Stephens know so well how the young speak? Has he been trawling the drinkeries of Saturday night Cardiff? Like a present-day Kingsley Amis but with Welsh sympathy he's written a fiction most 30-year-old wannabes would die for.'

Peter Finch