'Who made an ache under my rib?'. Asks the poet on the first page of Love from Wales, and just what makes the Welsh a passionate race? This new selection of poetry and prose on the theme of love by Welsh poet Tony Curtis and novelist Sian James offers some lively answers. Love from Wales features extracts from novels and short stories, as well as complete poems and letters, ranging from the eleventh century to the present. The book includes many translations from the original Welsh. We begin in the Spring section, with the awkward adolescents of Dylan Thomas's Extraordinary Little Cough and Dannie Abse's Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve, then move towards the full Summer love of Gillian Clarke's Choughs who 'mate for life' and John Ormond's lovely poem to his wife, Design for a Quilt. Then it's onward to Autumn where love ripens into Alun Richards's The Scandalous Thoughts of Elmyra Mouth. Here we find Caradoc Evans's sly tale of a farmer's son sent off to market to find a wife akin to A Heifer Without Blemish. Finally, to Winter and Alun Lewis's poignant Post-script for Gweno, R.S. Thomas's stern Like That, and Vernon Watkin's moving Great Night Returning. Other writers featured include: Jean Earle, Gwyn Thomas, David Lloyd George, Richard Llewellyn, Emyr Humphreys, Jean Rhys, Idris Davies, John Tripp, and many more.

Thirteenth-century Wales is a divided country, ever at the mercy of England's ruthless, power-hungry King John. Llewelyn, Prince of North Wales, secures an uneasy truce by marrying the English king's beloved illegitimate daughter, Joanna, who slowly grows to love her charismatic and courageous husband. But as John's attentions turn again and again to subduing Wales---and Llewelyn---Joanna must decide where her love and loyalties truly lie. The turbulent clashes of two disparate worlds and the destinies of the individuals caught between them spring to life in this magnificent novel of power and passion, loyalty and lies. The book that began the trilogy that includes Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning, Here Be Dragons brings thirteenth-century England, France, and Wales to tangled, tempestuous life.

For readers of H Is for Hawk, an intimate memoir of belonging and loss and a mesmerizing travelogue through the landscapes and language of Wales Hiraeth is a Welsh word that's famously hard to translate. Literally, it can mean "long field" but generally translates into English, inadequately, as "homesickness." At heart, hiraeth suggests something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time—an acute awareness of the presence of absence. In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life—as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible AMTRAK train crash, and as the daughter of a parent with dementia. Through the pull and tangle of these stories and her travels throughout Wales, hiraeth takes on radical new meanings. There is traditional hiraeth of place and home, but also queer hiraeth; and hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics. On this journey, the notion begins to morph from a uniquely Welsh experience to a universal human condition, from deep longing to the creative responses to loss that Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture. It becomes a tool to understand ourselves in our time. A finalist for the Wales Book of the Year Award and named to the Telegraph's and Financial Times's Top 10 lists for travel writing, The Long Field is an unforgettable exploration of “the hidden contours of the human heart.”

This book explores how that love influenced Tolkien's ideas about linguistic taste, his invention of languages, many of the themes and motifs in his creative writing, and his sense of a (regional) English identity. Drawing on unpublished material as well as Tolkien's published fiction, poetry and academic writing, Tolkien and Wales describes more fully than ever before the extent and depth of Tolkien's debt to the Welsh language and Welsh literature. It also argues that Tolkien's love of Wales and Welsh is inseparable from his love of England and his sense of belonging to the border country of the West Midlands. Besides discussing such famous books as The Hobbil and The Lord of the Rings, particular attention is paid to relatively neglected texts such as Tolkien's lecture on 'English and Welsh' and a poem that he published in The Welsh Review, The Lay of Aotrou and Iotroun. Where earlier scholarship has addressed Tolkien's debt to Welsh it has tended to do so in the context of 'Celtic' influence in general, but this book shows that Tolkien had very different attitudes to different Celtic languages. Tolkien and Wales reveals the seminal influence of Wales and Welsh on the writings of the twentieth century's most popular writer. Book jacket.

This biographical travel writing is a very personal view of Dylan Thomas' Wales through the eyes of a Celtic cousin. Table of Contents:Dylan, Dylan and Me: An Introduction To Begin at the Beginning: The Ugly, Lovely Town Dylan’s Carmarthenshire Roots New Quay – An Interlude in West Wales Beyond the Border Laugharne – Dylan’s Resting Place Frank Jenkins on Dylan Dylan’s Welsh Friends Dylan in Music Dylan’s Irish Connections Milestones Key Works Visiting Dylan’s World