Are you planning to join Reading Wales ’25 but haven’t yet decided what to read? Here are a few suggestions of authors and/or books to get you started. It’s not intended as a definitive guide, more as a jumping off point of books in various categories. Some of these titles are books I’ve read (with links to any available reviews); others are recommendations from friends and acquaintances.
Literary Fiction
Cynan Jones: The Cove and The Long Dry are fabulous lyrical novellas
Carys Davies: Her short novel West and the full length novel The Mission House are particular favourites.
Caryl Lewis: Drift is the first English language novel by this poet. Contains some mythical elements.
Cath Barton: her novella In The Sweep of The Bay explores a long marriage and a relationship where love has faded.
Sarah Gethin: Not Thomas was shortlisted for the The Guardian’s “Not the Booker prize” project in 2017.
Trezza Azzopardi : Her Booker shortlisted novel The Hiding Place evokes a time when the city of Cardiff was one of the oldest multi-racial communities in Britain.
Crime fiction/Thrillers
Chris Lloyd: The Unwanted Dead is the first book in a series set in France during the time of the Nazi occupation. It won the HWA Gold Crown Award for best historical novel of the year and was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger Award for the best historical crime fiction.
Kate Hamer: Her debut novel The Girl in the Red Coat is a psychologically tense novel that calls to mind that darkly disturbing fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood.
Beverley Jones : Her novel Wilderness, published under the name of B.E Jones — was adapted for TV and became a highly rated series on Amazon Prime.
Historical Fiction
Alis Hawkins: Her Teifi Valley Coroner series is a meticulously researched series set in West Wales in the mid nineteenth century.
Welsh “classics”
The Mabinogian The big one in Welsh classic literature from Wales, this is a collection of tales written in the fourteenth century that evoke Celtic myths and legends.
Caradog Prichard: One Moonlit Night is a novel about a child growing up in a community beset by poverty and hardship. It sounds bleak but that is counterbalanced by joy and exhuberance. The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales called the book “one of the most impressive novels to be published in Wales since the Second World War.”
Dylan Thomas: A Child’s Christmas in Wales is one of Thomas’s most popular works for its nostalgic reminiscence of his boyhood in Swansea. You can get a flavour of the poetry in these extracts recorded by Michael Sheen. Even more popular and famous is his 1954 play for voices Under Milk Wood which invites the audience to listen to the dreams and innermost thoughts of people in a small (fictional) Welsh fishing town. Watch a film version starring Richard Burton here – just turn off the visuals and listen to his voice…..
You’ll find a more extensive list of classics here.
Non Fiction
Mike Parker: His memoir On the Red Hill — was highly commended in the 2020 Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing and won the non-fiction Wales Book of the Year Award. In his most recent book, All the Wide Border — Wales, England and The Places Between — he travels a route along the England–Wales border, examining the concept of borders, our fascination with them, our need for them, and our response to their power.
Poetry
Two names stand head and shoulders above the rest: Dylan Thomas and R.S Thomas.
Dylan Thomas: by the time he died he’d built a reputation (which he did little to correct) as a “roistering, drunken and doomed poet. As a poet his work is notable for its rhythmic, inventive use of words and imagery. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” “And death shall have no dominion” and “Fernhill” are among his best known works.
R S Thomas: While Dylan Thomas rejected any idea of “Welshness” in his poetry, his namesake was very much a Welsh poet. Ordained as an Anglican priest, he learned to speak and write in the Welsh language and became a fierce advocate of Welsh nationalism. Much of his work concerns the Welsh landscape and the hardships endured by the farming communities he encountered in his parish. His most famous poem is Welsh Landscape.
If you have a favourite that’s missing from my list, please leave a comment below.