Welsh Book Club ( Archived Material )

Hi Graham

We would be delighted to review anything you send us. I will email you shortly with our physical address.

Ceri

check out our www.aber-creative-writing.com site and let me know what you think. Can we send you copies to review on here from our office in North wales?

The book was originally published (by Gomer Press) in 2002 under the title "O! Tyn y Gorchudd" and has now been translated by Lloyd Jones. My Welsh is (I'm sorry to say) nowhere near good enough to read the original so I'm grateful for Jones's wonderful English version published by Maclehose Press this year. Although it is a novel, it's about a real family.

Will be interested to hear more about the Angharad Price book. Not a title that I was aware of.

Three books reviewed in The Western Mail are: Slaying the Dragon (Y Lolfa) by Robert W Griffiths is an examination by an atheist of religion. The title comes from Bertrand Russell "It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion."

Spying for Hitler: The Welsh Double-Cross (University of Wales Press) by John Humphries tells the story of how the Abwehr attempted to use Welsh nationalist feeling to recruit agents in Wales.

A Sixpenny Christmas (Random House) by Katie Flynn is a war-time romance set in Snowdonia and Liverpool.

I shall write more fully about it in a few days (when I've dried my tears!) but I have to say that Angharad Price's book The Life of Rebecca Jones is one of the most beautiful and moving books I've read.

I would like to include David Lloyds "Warriors" I was lucky enough to hear him read at an open mic night in Merthyr and got a signed copy of his new poetry book, I love it.

A description of Caernarvonshire 1809 -1811 by Edmund Hyde Hall.

Edited from the original MS. in the Library of the University College of North Wales by Emyr Gwynne Jones.

The tribulations of a man travelling alone, on foot, over mountains, through often barren landscape of the county. I love dipping into this book and sharing the loneliness of this man's journeys as he attempts to catalogue Caernarfonshire. A description, because of its close proximity to my home always appeals to me. Hyde Hall says 'In quitting the fortress (which is from painful experience I can suggest ought to be done by the same path by which it is visited), and in advancing along the back of the hill towards Conway, the traveller soon arrives at a scene which is absolutely bewildering from the multitude of its objects. Druidal circles of various sizes, stones of memorials, and tumuli or carneddau without number, all evidence that this spot had been equally conspicuous in the history of British warfare and of British superstition.'

Not a lot has changed since he wrote this!

Copies of reprints of the book are still available.

"The Rape Of The Fair Country" - Alexander Cordell. Also 'The Hosts of Rebecca and 'Song of the Earth'.

You can actually go on tours of 'Cordell Country'.