SIX OF THE BEST : Literary Welsh Connections

By Gillian Hamer

For a small country, Wales certainly has a huge amount of literary clout - not only in the talents of Welsh authors but as setting for some superb fictional triumphs. Below, I list six of my personal favourites.

THE MABINOGION

No foray into Welsh literature would be complete without a mention of this book; it is the original, earliest and probably the best collection of Welsh prose stories. Legend tells that the stories of the Mabinogion were carried down from oral versions and were translated and compiled in the 12th and 13th century into a collection of eleven stories that we know today that appear in either or both of two medieval Welsh manuscripts, the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest.
The topics are wide and varied from philosophy to tragedy to humour many heavy with Welsh folklore and Celtic traditions. The stories were translated into English and modern Welsh in 1838 and are today part of the Welsh national curriculum.

UNDER MILK WOOD
I’m not a huge follower of much of Dylan Thomas’s work, but I fell into love at school with the drama Under Milk Wood from the moment our English literature teacher told our class that the name of the fictional Welsh fishing village – Llareggub – was actually Bugger All spelled backwards! With that kind of dark humour attracting me, I enjoyed both the 1954 BBC radio adaption and the 1972 film version.
The narrator takes the listener on a journey through the dreams and nightmares of the inhabitants of Llareggub, showing the dark and innermost thoughts of those who no one believed had ever owned a dark side. With fantastic characters such as Captain Cat, Myfanwy Price, Jack Black and Evans the Death this is a fantastic exploration of real people’s desires and fears from a hugely talented writer who found it easy to explore human nature.

THE LITTLE STRANGER

And what connection can this iconic novel by Sarah Waters have with Wales? Well, none is the honest answer. But the author certainly did. Born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire in 1966 Waters has often mentioned the beauty of the Pembrokeshire countryside as one of the greatest inspiration for her work. The Little Stranger is a brilliantly told story of family, mistrust and even ghosts if you believe in that kind of thing. It is currently being adapted into film.

For me there is a Celtic essence through much of Water’s writing and for that reason I believe she should be included in the Welsh connections.

FALL OF GIANTS

Another author with strong Welsh connections. Born in Cardiff, Follett was a reporter at the South Wales Echo and said his love of literature was sparked by visits to the Cowbridge Road Library in Cardiff, which he joined when he was seven.
My favourite work is his 2012 epic Fall of Giants, with follows the lives of  five families through the trials and dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women and features a coal mining family based in part on his grandfather’s experience of working in the pits from the age of thirteen.

MIDNIGHT SKY SERIES

Jan Ruth's series of contemporary women's fiction novels is set in one of my favourite places in the world - the North Wales coastline. Her use of location as a character in its own right brings her writing alive for me. And her passion for horses combined with the beauty of the landscape gives the reader the feeling of being in safe hands. For anyone who doesn't understand the power of location, I certainly recommend this series, or any other book by this author, and can imagine many people have chosen to take a visit to Conwy and the surrounding area after reading this author's work.

UNTIL OUR BLOOD IS DRY

Written by Kit Habianic a fiercely proud Welsh author and based on the fiercely proud past generations of her Welsh forbears, this is a spine-tingling read about a period in history that put Wales in the news for all the wrong reasons. When the miner's strike devastated normal working families in the South Wales valleys in the mid-1980's there were a huge number of stories of individual triumphs and disaster like the one detailed here. This novel screams everything that it means to be Welsh - the history, language, passion, tragedy and the intensity of the time comes across brilliantly here. Highly recommended.

Six of the Best: Books Set in British Cities

by Catriona Troth

You could often be forgiven for thinking – at least as far as fiction is concerned – that British urban life begins and ends at the boundaries of Greater London. In the immediate postwar period, books like John Braine’s Room at the Top and Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning featured northern cities. But it is hard to find modern equivalents.

Birmingham is relatively well served, with books such as Nice Work by David Lodge, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters Club, Meera Syall’s Anita and Me or – more recently – Kit de Waal’s My Name is Leon. But my beloved Coventry – so rich in music and stories – scarcely appears in novels at all. (If anyone knows better, I’d love to hear from you!)

But here are six books that do capture a slice of urban life outside the Metropolis.

BRADFORD: Girl Zero by AA Dhand

Like all the best crime writers, Dhand explores the dark underbelly of the place he loves – and his Bradford can get very dark indeed. His first novel tackled drugs and racial violence. This second book opens with his detective, Harry Virdee, confronting the body of his own niece. To begin with it seems likely that her death is linked to his brother’s nefarious activities. But (reminiscent of Craven in the incomparable 80s television series, Edge of Darkness) he soon finds she has been uncovering some dark and dangerous secrets of her own – in this case the activities of a child grooming gang. These are modern atrocities crying out to be explored through the medium of crime fiction. Yet there is so much danger of either tarring a whole community with the sins of a few, or looking away for fear of causing offense, that perhaps it’s taken a writer from a British Asian community to dare to turn this into fiction.

Read my full review on BookMuseUK. 

 

BRISTOL: The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer

This book won the 2013 Costa Book of the Year for mental health nurse Filer, who has used his experience to create a rare and honest portrayal of schizophrenia. But the book is also an examination of the impact of grief and loss on a family. And if this all sounds heavy, it is also at times both funny and touching.

In the end notes, Filer describes envisaging the book as ‘the crumpled stack of Matt’s writing and drawings; the typewriter pages with their smudged ink; the letters from Denise; the words that Patricia cut up and stuck down with Pritt Stick.” What a joy that would be to discover in a book shop – if hopelessly expensive to produce.

Read my full review on BookMuseUK. 

GLASGOW: Psychoraag by Suhayl Saadi

Psychoraag takes place in the course of one evening. It is the last night of broadcasting for an Asian radio station in Glasgow, and DJ Zaf is alone. Zaf’s thoughts range over the changing nature of the South Asian community who are his audience, his parents’ long journey from Pakistan to Glasgow, his sometimes rocky relationship with his girlfriend Babs, and his even rockier relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Zilla, whom he may or may not have started on a path that led to drug-addiction and prostitution. As the long night wears on, it becomes harder and harder to work out what is really happening and what is the product of Zaf’s exhausted brain.

Written in broad Glaswegian dialect, peppered with expressions in Urdu, Arabic, Punjabi and even Gaelic, Psychoraag is a rollercoaster of a ride, not for the fainthearted.

Read my full review on BookMuseUK.

IPSWICH: 22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson

A wonderful, lyrical novel exploring what is means for a small family to have been separated by a war, to have undergone terrible experiences and keep secrets from each other – and then to have to pick up the threads of their lives again after the war. The main characters are, like many others in East Anglia, Polish. The father fought with the Polish arm of the RAF; the wife and son are refugees, traced to a Red Cross camp after the War. 

LIVERPOOL – An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

Bainbridge’s classic captures life Liverpool as it must have been when my parents met there in the late 1940s. She also captures the now all-but vanished world of the repertory theatre, as the action is set in the midst of a Christmas production of Peter Pan – with the title referencing Peter’s chilling quote: “to die would be an awfully big adventure.” So much of post-War British society is encapsulated – from the shabbiness and deprivation to the entrenched classism and the repression of its sexual politics. You know this is a world that is on the point of vanishing. 

SHEFFIELD: The Year of the Runways by Sunjeev Sahota

< The story opens with a scene that echoes the early episodes of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. Young men, far from home, packed together in cramped, basic conditions, working long hours on a construction site to send money back to their families. Through the lens of these four lives, Sahota reveals the human face of economic migration, the myth of return, and such headline fodder as illegal workers, scam marriages and abused student visas. This is a book that will shake your belief that we are in any way a ‘fair’ or ‘equal’ society. Like Dickens’ Victorians, we climb on the backs of an army of invisible poor. The only difference is the poverty is now globalised.

Read my full review on BookMuseUK.

Six of the Best: Powerful Women in History

by JD Smith

We have all heard of Cleopatra, Boadicea, Helen of Troy, Elizabeth I. They are famed for their  prominence in a man's world, but what of those who are lesser known yet equally influential, powerful and dominant. Here's a peek at my top six lesser known women in history:

Grace O'Malley (1530 - 1603)

O'Malley became lord of the Ó Máille dynasty in the west of Ireland following the death of her father, Eoghan Dubhdara Ó Máille, despite having a brother, Dónal an Phíopa Ó Mháille. 

Marriage to Dónal an Chogaidh Ó Flaithbheartaigh brought her greater wealth and influence, reportedly owning as much as 1,000 head of cattle and horses. In 1593, when her sons and her half-brother were taken captive by the English governor of Connacht, Sir Richard Bingham, she sailed to England to petition for their release. She formally presented her request to Elizabeth I at her court in Greenwich, refusing to bow because she did not acknowledge Elizabeth being a queen.

Ching Shih (1775 - 1844)

Shih was a Chinese pirate who led one of the largest piracy fleets to ever exist, commanded up to 40,000 pirates. She enter into conflict with the British and Portuguese Empires, as well as the Qing dynasty.

The Chinese government attempted to destroy her fleet in a series of battles, but were unable to do so. Shih captured the government's ships and took them over, adding to her own fleet, and the Chinese were left with only fishing vessels and the like for military use. 

Artemisia I of Caria (5th Century BCE)

Artemisia was a Greek queen of the ancient Greek city of Halicarnassus and of the nearby islands of Kos, Nisyros and Kalymnos. She fought as an ally of Xerxes I, King of Persia against the independent Greek city states during the Persian invasion of Greece. She personally commanded her own five ships in the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE. She is mostly known through the writings of Herodotus, himself a native of Halicarnassus, who praises her courage and the respect in which Xerxes held her.


Borte Ujin (1161-1230) 

Borte Ujin was empress of the Mongolian Empire, the largest land empire in history. She was also one of Genghis Khan’s wives and most trusted advisers. Whilst many of Genghis Khan's wives accompanied him as he went to war for long periods, she ruled the Mongol homeland and managed her own court.


Wu Zetian (690 - 705)

Wu was the sole officially recognized empress regnant of China in more than two millennia. Her political and military leadership includes the major expansion of the Chinese empire, extending it deep into Central Asia, and engaging in a series of wars on the Korean Peninsula.


Wu's leadership resulted in important effects regarding social class in Chinese society and in relation to state support for Taoism, Buddhism, education, and literature.


Queen Hatshepsut (1507–1458 BC)

Hatshepsut was fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. According to Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, Hatshepsut is also known as "the first great woman in history of whom we are informed.

Hatshepsut officially ruled jointly with Thutmose III, who had ascended to the throne as a child of about two years old. Hatshepsut was the chief wife of Thutmose II, Thutmose III’s father.

During her reign she established many trade routes, funding trading expeditions and building the wealth of the eighteenth dynasty. She was also one of the most prolific builders in ancient Egypt, commissioning hundreds of construction projects.


Credit: Wikipedia

Six of the Best: Books on WW2 French Resistance

By Liza Perrat

The French village in which I live originally inspired me for the first novel, Spirit of Lost Angels, of my French historical trilogy, The Bone Angel.

An exhibition in a museum in Saint-Martins-en-Haut, a neighbouring village, gave me the idea to base the second novel of the trilogy, Wolfsangel, around the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation during WW2.



 I realised that this region, like many others in France, was a hotbed of French resistance. During my research, I was fortunate to speak with several members of the Resistance, who were only too happy to relive their days of fighting for the liberation of their country.

But for further information, I consulted both fiction and non-fiction books on the subject.

Here are six of my favourites, four non-fiction and two fiction works, with Goodreads links:

NON-FICTION

Outwitting the Gestapo

by Lucie Aubrac

Lucie Aubrac (1912-2007), of Catholic and peasant background, was a history teacher in Lyon, married to Jewish engineer, Raymond Aubrac, when WW2 broke out.

The couple soon joined the Resistance movement in opposition to the Nazis and their collaborators, and Outwitting the Gestapo is Lucie’s harrowing account of her participation: of the months when, heavily-pregnant, she planned and took part in raids to free comrades—including her husband, under Nazi death sentence—from Montluc, the prison of Klaus Barbie, infamous Butcher of Lyon.
 
Her book was also the basis for the 1997 French movie, Lucie Aubrac, which I greatly enjoyed.

 Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France

by Agnès Humbert

Agnès Humbert was an art historian in Paris during the German occupation in 1940. Stirred to action by the atrocities she witnessed, she joined forces with several colleagues to form an organized resistance.

In fact, their newsletter, Résistance, gave the French Resistance its name. During their struggle for freedom, the members of
Humbert’s group were betrayed to the Gestapo; Humbert herself was imprisoned.

In immediate, electrifying detail, Humbert describes her resistance against the Nazis, her time in prison, and the horrors she endured in a string of German labor camps, always retaining — in spite of everything — hope for herself, for her friends, and for humanity.

   The Silence of the Sea 

by Vercors

The Silence of the Sea, written in Nazi-occupied France, is an intensely dramatic story of an old Frenchman and his niece, and of the German officer billeted in their house. Both the story, and the circumstances of its publication, bear eloquent witness to the triumph of the mind of man over terrible circumstances.

The identity of the author, “Vercors” is unknown, though he was undoubtedly one of that large number of French men of letters who, like the old man in “The Silence of the Sea”, refused to compromise with the Nazis in any way.

This novel, written in mortal peril, published clandestinely in France and smuggled to freedom, is a real victory for the human spirit, showing that humans have cared enough for things of the mind to risk their lives to breach the impenetrable wall of silence the Nazis built around France.

Moondrop to Gascony 

by Anne-Marie Walters

On a cold, moonlit night in January 1944, Anne-Marie Walters, just twenty years old, parachuted into southwest France to work with the Resistance in preparation for the long-awaited Allied invasion.

The daughter of a British father and a French mother, she was to act as a courier for George Starr, head of the “Wheelwright” circuit of the Special Operations Executive. Over the next seven months, Walters crisscrossed the region, carrying messages, delivering explosives, arranging the escape of downed airmen, and receiving parachute drops of arms and personnel in the dead of night, living in constant fear of capture and torture by the Gestapo.

Then, on the very eve of liberation, she was sent off on foot over the Pyrenees to Spain, carrying urgent dispatches for London. It is a tale of high adventure, comradeship and kindness, of betrayals and appalling atrocities, and of the often unremarked courage of many ordinary French men and women who risked their lives to help drive German armies from French soil. And through it all shines her quiet courage, a keen sense of humor and, above all, her pure zest for life.

***

FICTION

Shadows of a Childhood 

by Elisabeth Gille

A haunting and powerful book written by one of the daughters of Irène Némirovsky, author of Suite Française. Némirovsky and her husband died in Nazi concentration camps, but their daughters were hidden and escaped death.


In this story, Elisabeth Gille gives a fictionalized account of when, as five-year old Lea Levy, she was hidden away by the nuns of a Bordeaux convent when the Nazis deported her parents.


But there is no happy ending for her after the fall of Nazi Germany, which is what makes this book so powerful, to see the pain and suffering for the Jews that came after liberation.


 

 Charlotte Gray 

by Sebastian Faulks (French Trilogy #3)

Charlotte Gray is the story of a young Scottish woman who becomes caught up in the effort to liberate Occupied France from the Nazis while pursuing a perilous mission of her own.

In blacked-out, wartime London, Charlotte Gray develops a dangerous passion for a battle-weary RAF pilot, and when he fails to return from a daring flight into France she is determined to find him.

In the service of the Resistance, she travels to the village of Lavaurette, dyeing her hair and changing her name to conceal her identity. Here she will come face-to-face with the harrowing truth of what took place during Europe’s darkest years, and will confront a terrifying secret that threatens to cast its shadow over the remainder of her days.

Resistance museum poster

Resistance museum poster

Six of the Best: Books set in European Cities

By JJ Marsh

“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” – Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

Dubrovnik, Croatia

For someone like me, born in Wales who spent formative years in Africa and Asia, continental Europe has a attraction like nowhere else. There lies history, romance, culture and stories. It has a wealth of geographical attractions such as Portuguese beaches, Swiss mountains, Italian lakes and French vineyards. But my passion is for the cities.

Amsterdam in January: discarded Christmas trees beside canals; bikes, bridges and gables.
Madrid at Easter: dramatic daytime parades, roasted garlic and parties that start at midnight.
Porto at São João: everyone out with squeaky hammers, eating sardines and watching fireworks.
Stuttgart in the autumn: beer in open squares at communal tables, with new friends and brass bands.
Pardubice in winter: frozen lakes, steaming saunas, freezing attics and extremely strong cheese.
Naples in July: ripe tomatoes, brown skin, tiny trucks and the sensory overload of the harbour.

Each has an atmosphere all its own and I never tire of exploring their present - in person - and past through literature.

I’ve chosen six books to transport you to another time and place while relaxing into the story. If you have any novel ways of exploring a city, I’d love to know.


Delft 1660s: Girl with a Pearl Earring – Tracy Chevalier

As delicate as a work of art, the book explores the complex relationships of the Vermeer household. The artist who has come to represent the Dutch Golden Age completed only two to three paintings a year, putting the household economy under pressure.
When Griet, the new maid, seems to inspire the master, tensions build between his wife, his mother-in-law and the observant Griet. Delft’s canals, markets and Calvinist culture all spring to life on the page, creating a beautiful background to what might have been.


Paris 1785: Pure – Andrew Miller

Jean-Baptiste Baratte is summoned from the quiet town of Bellême to Paris, to complete a rather unusual task. He is to clear the cemetery of Les Innocents. Miller describes the city of Paris, the cemetery and its long-dead inhabitants, the local people and his own arc of change with such graceful sensory evocation, I was reminded of Suskind’s Perfume.
The characters are fascinating, all portrayed through Baratte’s perceptions and prejudices. But it’s the setting that makes you feel you’ve been in another world, another time, another place and experienced it so vividly that you put it down feeling a little disorientated to find yourself on the bus.


Barcelona 1945: The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is where ten-year-old Daniel encounters The Shadow of the Wind. He is charged with protecting that copy as the only one in existence. The book enthralls him and he wants to find out more about the author.
But Julián Carax is dead and Daniel’s commitment to the book is attracting enemies. Not least a mysterious man seeking out all Carax’s work with the aim of total eradication. Barcelona through the eyes of a child in a country under a different kind of shadow.
  

Naples 1950s: My Brilliant Friend – Elena Ferrante

On the surface, this is a coming-of-age novel set in a poor, violent suburb of Naples. Yet it has depths of love, beauty, politics, social observation, spite, generosity and anger all rendered in sparkling prose.
The reader is immersed in this Southern Italian environment, narrated by Elena Greco, whose entire story of her growth and development into her late teens is refracted through the lens of comparison. Ferrante’s cast of characters is broad and its hierarchy rigid. Brutal threats between neighbours, families, lovers are rarely idle and an undercurrent of honour, vengeance and blood runs just below the surface.
Passions and dramas abound on the small stage of their little community, set against a greater backdrop of the recent war, political extremism and the importance of having the right connections.


Lisbon 1960s/1970s/now: Night Train to Lisbon – Pascal Mercier

A chance meeting with a Portuguese woman on a bridge in Bern provokes Gregorius, a Swiss teacher of Classics, to follow his curiosity. It leads him to a book, ‘Um Ourives das Palavras’ (A Goldsmith of Words), written by Amadeu de Prado.
In an uncharacteristic act of spontaneity, Gregorius walks away from his life and boards a night train to Lisbon, just to discover more about the author. He discovers the city as a stranger and the language through sheer determination, constantly learning the harsh truths about the recent dictatorship and effects on its people.


Moscow early 2000s: Snowdrops – AD Miller

The eponymous snowdrop refers to a body buried under the winter snow which only comes to light in the thaw. The image is relevant both literally and metaphorically to AD Miller’s Moscow tale of corruption and moral erosion.
The book is ostensibly a letter from Nick to his fiancée, cleaning the slate by confessing his past. He was working as a lawyer in Moscow, where he met Masha and Katya, and so began his decay. The author uses the setting of wintry Moscow, and the period just before the credit crunch, to great reflective effect. Nick’s moral choices are underpinned by a sense of ‘Right here, right now, this is just how it works’. But one day, the snow will melt …

 

JJ Marsh is the author of The Beatrice Stubbs Series. Each book is more than a heart-racing crime novel; it's a European adventure. From the snow-capped peaks of Switzerland to a deserted Welsh beach or golden vineyards in the Basque country of Spain; each story is immersed in the landscape, culture, cuisine, architecture and personality of its location. http://beatrice-stubbs.com/