If people are geographical beings, what can fiction tell us about this truth? This book explores how literature can help us understand the nature of the relations between people and place, how humans create connections between their identities and their geographies, and how these can be threatened and lost. Literature is an important, if unusual, way to explore these relations. At once centred in imagination and ideas, fiction is also indelibly connected to, as well as influenced by, the geographies in which it is set. As this book argues, the relationship between fiction and location is so important that it is often difficult to know which is imagined and which is real. Exploring the relations between people and place through fiction writing set in Wales, Page and Place garners poetic insight into how places are written into our stories, and how these stories take and make the places around us. The book introduces the notion of ‘plot’ to describe the complex entanglement between fiction and geography, and to help understand the role that places play in defining human identity.

This guidebook provides a remarkable overview of the Welsh town Aberystwyth--a community of two languages that contains a university, a farming community, a port-turned-marina, the National Library of Wales, provides a home for writers and spies alike, and was also made recently famous--or infamous--by Malcolm Pryce's novels. The travel guide details an enthralling account of a city that is any number of conflicting and complimentary things--from its medieval beginnings through its Victorian heyday to the fluid mix of longstanding natives, large student population, and colony of those who came and never left. Mixing autobiography with topography, aligning the oblique approach with historical report, and contrasting the prosaic with the downright odd, this study paints a vivid picture of a world-famous town.

Observant, passionate, witty, offbeat, Mike Parker tours Powys from the border towns of Hay on Wye, Presteigne and Knighton, through the interior and on to the furthest points of Newtown, Penybont, Ystradgynlais and Brecon. What surprises does he stumble upon among the mountains, forests, streams and farms of this mysterious countryside?

Schoolboys are disappearing all over Aberystwyth and nobody knows why. Louie Knight, the town's private investigator, soon realises that it is going to take more than a double ripple from Sospan, the philosopher cum ice-cream seller, to help find out what is happening to these boys and whether or not Lovespoon, the Welsh teacher, Grand Wizard of the Druids and controller of the town, is more than just a sinister bully. And just who was Gwenno Guevara?

There is nothing unusual about the barrel-organ man who walks into private detective Louie Knight's office. Apart from the fact that he has lost his memory. And his monkey is a former astronaut. And he is carrying a suitcase that he is too terrified to open. And he wants a murder investigated. The only thing unusual about the murder is that it took place a hundred years ago. And needs solving by the following week. Louie is too smart to take on such a case but also too broke to turn it down. Soon he is lost in a labyrinth of intrigue and terror, tormented at every turn by a gallery of mad nuns, gangsters and waifs, and haunted by the loss of his girlfriend, Myfanwy, who has disappeared after being fed drugged raspberry ripple ...

Small-minded academic Dr Llwyd Mcnamara has a grant to research Wales' biggest here, rugby star Dylan Manawydan Jones - Big M. But as he plays with USB sticks in his office, the gods have other plans... Lloyd Jones retells this Third Branch of the Celtic myth cycle the Mabinogion with his usual wit, imaginative intelligence and love of language.