Books published by Parthian Books

In this acclaimed Greek novel, Auguste Corteau imagineshis own mother's inner life, observing with wit and earthyhumour the saga of her extended family's ups and downs inthe city of Thessaloniki over three generations.

Humorous, serious and sometimes outrageous, Topher Mills'poetry covers swimming, love, work, dialects, sex, politics,death and everything inbetween. From the incidental ordinaryto the waywardly imaginative Sex on Toast gathers Mills'best-known work together with a host of new and uncollectedmaterial.

Robert Clifford is in Cairo to present his latest film fora festival prize. It has taken seven gruelling years ofhis life to make and is definitely NOT a film about hismother. But his moment in the spotlight is not quite as hescripted.

This is a skilful collection by a poet well acquaintedwith relative place: wherever a poem lives, it alwaysremembers its place in the world. Indeed, juxtapositionsand connections - with place, culture, and amonghumans - are where the poet flexes his muscle - 'worksout' his ideas.

Covering one Sunday tournament in the depths of Languedoc when his team bids to make the National Finals, Bill Rees produces a deeply felt and deeply funny homage to the beautiful game of ping-pong. Rees shows the sport for what it is: painful, exhilarating, tactical, fast (especially when his club mate Alain is at the table), consuming.

Welsh-language translation of The Journey is Home. In this clear and absorbing memoir John Sam Jones writes of a life lived on the edge. It's a story of journeys and realisation, of acceptance and joy. From a boyhood on the coast of Wales to a traumatic period as an undergraduate in Aberystwyth, and on to a scholarship at Berkley on the San Francisco Bay as the AIDS epidemic began to take hold, before returning to Liverpool and north Wales to work in chaplaincy, education, and sexual health. A journey of becoming a writer and chronicler of his experiences with award-winning books and the somewhat reluctant compulsion to become a campaigner for LGBT rights in Wales. The adventure of running a guest house in Barmouth where he eventually became Mayor with his husband, a German academic, whom he had married after a long partnership. Just days after European Referendum they put the business on the market... and then moved to Germany. John is still on that journey.

Kristian Bang Foss' darkly comic, prize-winning road-novel satire sees two unlikely friends set out to defy the Danish welfare state - and Death himself - with both hilarious and tragic consequences.

Cariad County: a place of anarchy and farce, of the grotesque and the slapstick, of tragedy and violent comedy, where the local hunt is disrupted by a camel-riding hero, where the town hall burns down as the town cheers, a place haunted by grotesque revenants from the First World War. This is the world of Nigel Heseltine's short stories.

When a young family inherit a remote mountain-side cottage in north Wales, giving them the chance to change the course of their lives and start over, the one condition of the will seems strange but harmless. They are to care for a cormorant until the end of its life.

By any reasonable measurement, Love Actually is a bad movie. There are plenty of bad movies out there, but what gets under Gary Raymond's skin here is that it seems to have tricked so many people into thinking it's a good movie.

In a remote Welsh village by the sea, four friends grow up together. Plain but charismatic Del is the ringleader, unstoppable, supremely confident in her ability to get her own way. Neil, shy and stuttering, and Ricky, full of rage and loneliness, are misfits at school until Del takes them under her wing. Steph is the outsider, but she too is mesmerized by Del's devil-may-care approach to life. They hang around together - mucking about in the woods, searching for treasure on the seashore, doing dares, sharing cigarettes. Then, one terrible day, the gang is broken up for good. Meeting ten years later in the now stagnating village, Neil, Ricky and Steph revisit their childhood haunts and re-live the memories that have cast a shadow over each of their lives. Del is, by turns, the beating heart at the centre of all their stories and a gaping absence. Set against the backdrop of the northern Welsh coast, and told through the voices of Neil, Ricky and Steph - the children left behind - Revenant pieces together their memories of childhoods broken by desertion, absence and death, and uncovers the secrets and betrayals of childhood friendships, with thoughtful, shocking brilliance.

RAYMOND WILLIAMS was the most influentialsocialist writer and thinker in post-war Britain. Now, making full use of Williams's private and unpublishedpapers and by placing him in a wide social and culturallandscape, Dai Smith uncovers how Williams's life to 1961 is an explanationof his immense intellectual achievement.

In every atlas there is a country missing from the maps of South America: the Andean nation.For five months John Harrison journeys through this secret country, walking alone into remote villages where he is the first gringo the inhabitants have ever seen, and where life continues as if Columbus had never sailed. He lives at over 10,000 feet for most of the trip, following the great road of the Incas: the Camino Real, or Royal Road. Hand built over 500 years ago, it crosses the most difficult and dangerous mountains in all the Americas, diving into sweltering canyons and soaring up into the snows. 1500 miles, half of it on foot, takes him from the Equator to Cuzco and the most magical city of all: Machu Picchu. He is attacked, gets lost and is trapped by floods, but only when he goes home does he lose what he wants most.

John Harrison's Forgotten Footprints is the untold story of the sailors, sealers and eccentrics who discovered thelast continent: Antarctica. A thrilling record of lost triumph and tragedy, a saga of adventure and ambition against all odds, and a compelling insight into extraordinary personalities and the times that shaped them.

We all have our favourite demons. A desperate Romeo circles thebushes below Juliet's balcony, hoping for a glimpse of her barebody. Adamant of his own sanity, Hamlet chatters away to his oldest friend, the skullgrinning in his palm. Andromache screams for her only child,'spiralling like sycamore' from the walls of Troy.

Edited and with an introduction by David Cottis, andfollowing on from A Dirty Broth, which looked at thepioneers of the Welsh theatre in English, A Ladder of Wordsexplores the period either side of the Second World War,a time when Welsh playwrights enjoyed unprecedentedcommercial success, both at home and in the West End.

Bound together by blood ties, Martha, Jack and Shanco live ona farm in west Wales where their lives unfold in their eerie half-presence of their dead parents. Glimmers of understanding punctuate their relationship with oneanother, but unspoken animosity seems to be the most potentingredient.

This well-crafted novel is one of the few novels in either Irish or English that explores this generation of Irish people, often termed the "silent" or "lost generation" when over a half-a-million people emigrated, primarily to Britain, to work in the post-war economy there - "building England up and tearing it down again."

The six sequential essays in this collection provide anarrative of a century and a half of Welsh painting,written with an emphasis on issues of social classand national identity.

It is the summer of 1954. Four young men, on a summer vacation buyan old car from a farmer and drive it from the hills of Wales all theway to the mountains of Spain. They are innocent and war-scarred, dreamersand realists, men but not much more than boys. This will be their summer to remember.

From the remote forests of northern Ontario to aNeolithic burial chamber on the coast of north Wales,from a frozen lake in the Canadian wilderness to amysterious Welsh heath, Shatter Cones takes thereader on a strange, compelling and sometimesheart-breaking journey through the blurry juncturesthat bind together landscapes and lovers.

HELLO FRIEND WE MISSED YOU is a deeply poignant and bleakly comic debut novel about loneliness, the 'violent revenge thriller' category on Netflix, solipsism, rural gentrification, Jack Black, and learning to exist in the least excruciating way possible.

Cassandra Fish believes she is out of this world, wearing her orangefilm-set spacesuit daily in the hope that her absent parents will returnand take her back to her real planet. While she waits she accompaniesher friends on one last great night out to drink, dance, take bad chemicals, have bad trips,have bad ideas, and do unthinkable thing