NIALL GRIFFITHS
THE DREAMS OF MAX & RONNIE
There’s war and carnage abroad and Iraq-bound squaddie Ronnie is out with his mates ‘forgetting what has yet to happen’. He takes something dodgy and falls asleep for three nights in a filthy hovel where he has the strangest of dreams, watching the tattooed tribes of modern Britain surrounding a grinning man playing war games.
Meanwhile gangsta Max is fed up with life in his favourite Cardiff nightclub, Rome, and chases a vision of the perfect woman in far-flung parts of his country. But as Max loses his heart, his followers fear he may be losing his touch.
Niall Griffiths’ retellings of two dream myths from the medieval Welsh Mabinogion cycle reveal an astonishingly contemporary and satirical resonance. Arthurian legend merges with its twenty-first century counterpart in a biting commentary on leadership, conflict and the divisions in British society.
Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966, studied English, and now lives and works in Aberystwyth. His novels include Grits, Sheepshagger, Kelly and Victor and Stump, which won Wales Book of the Year, and Runt. His non-fiction includes Real Aberystwyth and Real Liverpool. He also writes reviews, radio plays and travel pieces.
HORATIO CLARE
THE PRINCE’S PEN
The Invaders’ drones hear all and see all, and England is now a defeated archipelago, but somewhere in the high ground of the far west, insurrection is brewing.
Ludo and Levello, the bandit kings of Wales, call themselves freedom fighters. Levello has the heart and help of Uzma, from Pakistan – the only other country in the free world. Ludo has a secret, lethal if revealed.
Award-winning author Horatio Clare refracts politics, faith and the contemporary world order through the prism of one of the earliest British myths, the Mabinogion, to ask who are the outsiders, who the infidels and who the enemy within...
Horatio Clare is a writer, radio producer and journalist. Born in London, he grew up on a hill farm in the Black Mountains of South Wales as described in his first book Running for the Hills, nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Horatio has written about Ethiopia, Namibia and Morocco, and now divides his time between South Wales, Lancashire and London. His other books include Sicily through Writers’ Eyes, Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope and A Single Swallow for which he was the recipient of a Somerset Maugham Award.
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