Books Set in Wales
Top 10 Books Set in Wales
: The Reckoning, Under Milk Wood, The Owl Service, The Dark Is Rising Sequence, The Welsh Girl, The Journey Through Wales & The Description of Wales, The History of the Kings of Britain, Rape of the Fair Country, Carrie's War, Howl's Moving Castle
| Author | Sharon Kay Penman |
| ISBN | 0345378881 |
"Penman's characters are so shrewdly imagined, so full of resonant human feeling that they seem to be on the page....Most compelling is the portrait of the Welsh as wild and rugged as their landscape."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Here, alive from the pages of history, is the compelling tale of...
| Author | Dylan Thomas |
| ISBN | 0811202097 |
Some works of literature just beg to be read out loud - This is the House that Jack Built and Hiawatha are two that most people are familiar with. Under Milk Wood too, is better appreciated read aloud.
Try it for yourself. A sample (read aloud with Welsh accent, sing-song, go up like a question at...
| Author | Alan Garner |
| ISBN | 0152056181 |
Something is scratching around in the attic above Alison's room. Yet the only thing up there is a stack of grimy old plates. Alison and her stepbrother, Roger, discover that the flowery patterns on the plates, when traced onto paper, can be fitted together to create owls-owls that disappear when no one...
| Author | Susan Cooper |
| ISBN | 0020425651 |
This series is fantastic, and has been horridly overlooked, particularly so seeming that our current culture seems so fascinated with all things Potter. Not that The Dark Is Rising is anything like Harry Potter - not at all. It's thickly steeped in Celtic and Arthurian legend, is relentless in its exploration...
| Author | Peter Ho Davies |
| ISBN | 0618007008 |
From the acclaimed writer Peter Ho Davies comes an engrossing wartime love story set in the stunning landscape of North Wales during the final, harrowing months of World War II.
Young Esther Evans has lived her whole life within the confines of her remote mountain village. The daughter of a...
| Author | Gerald of Wales |
| ISBN | 0140443398 |
Gerald of Wales was one of the most dynamic and colorful churchmen of the 12th century. His JOURNEY describes a mission to Wales undertaken in 1188 by Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, with Gerald as his companion. THE DESCRIPTION provides a picture of the day-to-day existence of ordinary Welshmen...
| Author | Geoffrey of Monmouth |
| ISBN | 0140441700 |
Completed in 1136, The History of the Kings of Britain traces the story of the realm from its supposed foundation by Brutus to the coming of the Saxons some two thousand years later. Vividly portraying legendary and semi-legendary figures such as Lear, Cymbeline, Merlin the magician and the most famous...
| Author | Alexander Cordell |
| ISBN | 1872730159 |
Set in the turbulent times of the Industrial Revolution in 19th century Wales, this famous novel begins the story of the Mortymer family and the ironmaking communities of Blaenavon and Nantyglo.
It is the book which launched Alexander Cordell in 1959 as a best selling author and was translated...
| Author | Nina Bawden |
| ISBN | 0140364560 |
Albert, Carrie and young Nick are war-time evacuees whose lives get so tangled up with the people they've come to live among that the war and their real families seem to belong to another world. Carrie and Nick are billeted in Wales with old Mr Evans, who is so mean and cold, and his timid mouse of a sister,...
An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here
Sophie has the great misfortune of being the eldest of three daughters, destined to fail miserably should she ever leave home to seek her fate. But when she unwittingly attracts the ire of the Witch of the Waste, Sophie finds herself under a...
| Author | Edith Pargeter |
| ISBN | 0747232679 |
Llewelyn's burning vision is of one Wales, united against the threat of the English. But before he can achieve his dream, he must first tackle enemies nearer home. All three of his brothers hamper his efforts to create an independent state. The best-loved of the three, David, brought up throughout his...
Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining,...
| Author | Stephen R. Lawhead |
| ISBN | 1595540857 |
Robin Hood
The Legend Begins Anew
For centuries, the legend of Robin Hood and his band of thieves has captivated the imagination. Now the familiar tale takes on new life, fresh meaning, and an unexpected setting.
Steeped in Celtic mythology and the political intrigue of...
| Author | Edith Pargeter |
| ISBN | 0446517089 |
A trilogy of novels set in twelfth-century England and Wales--The Heaven Tree, The Green Branch, and The Scarlet Seed--chronicles the adventures of master stone carver Harry Talvace; Ralf Isambard, Lord of Parfois; and their two sons.
Set on the volatile, hotly disputed Welsh border, this...
| Author | Malcolm Pryce |
| ISBN | 0747557861 |
Schoolboys are disappearing all over Aberystwyth and nobody knows why. Louie Knight, the town's private investigator, soon realizes 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...
The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain
| Author | Christopher Monger |
| ISBN | 0786881402 |
1917. The peace of a remote Welsh village, nestling comfortably in the shadow of what the inhabitants reverently call their 'mountain', is rudely shatterred by the arrival of two English mapmakers who have the temerity to announce that the 'mountain' is merely a 'hill' in geographical terms.
It...
| Author | Susan Cooper |
| ISBN | 0689840330 |
The Dark is rising in its last and greatest bid to control the world. And Will Stanton -- last-born of the immortal Old Ones, dedicated to keeping the world free -- must join forces with this ageless master Merriman and Bran, the Welsh boy whose destiny ties him to the Light. Drawn in with them are the three...
| Author | Ellis Peters |
| ISBN | 0446400181 |
To tie in with the hardcover release of Peters' The Benediction of Brother Cadfael, here is the 18th entry in the eminently successful medieval detective series. In the summer of 1144, Brother Cadfael is sent to Wales on church business and is captured by Danes. And when a prisoner is murderer, the clever...
On the Black Hill is an elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the twentieth century.
In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis...
| Author | Evangeline Walton |
| ISBN | 1585675040 |
The retelling of the epic Welsh myth that is "certainly among the top 5 fantasy series of the twentieth century" (sfsite.com).
The Mabinogion is to Welsh mythology what the tales of Zeus, Hera, and Apollo are to Greek myth. these tales constitute a powerful work of the imagination, ranking...
Every night, 12-year-old Gwenni Morgan flies in her sleep. She leaves the bed she shares with her sister and soars into the night sky, listening to the nighttime sounds of her small Welsh village below. Irrepressible Gwenni -- a dreamer full of unanswerable questions and unbounded curiosity -- is childlike...
| Author | Malcolm Pryce |
| ISBN | 0747595194 |
It was a sweltering August in Aberystwyth: the bandstand melts, the Pier droops, and Sospan the ice-cream seller experiments with some dangerously avant-garde new flavours. A man wearing a Soviet museum curator's uniform walks into Louie Knight's office and spins a wild and impossible tale of love,...
| Author | Edith Pargeter |
| ISBN | 0747233667 |
From Edith Pargeter, who also wrote as Ellis Peters, A BLOODY FIELD BY SHREWSBURY is a vivid medieval tale of Henry IV's kingdom in crisis. 'Chivalry, treachery, conflict of loyalties... The clash of wills is as stirring as the clash of steel' Observer
It is 1399. Henry Bolingbroke, unjustly...
| Author | Raymond Williams |
| ISBN | 1902638816 |
What a beautiful book. It took me some time to get into it, but as I got used to the pace it began to dig deeply into my psyche. At some point I began to realise that this could well have been the autobiographical voice of my father, who became an academic, and who's own father was a signalman. It's billed as being...
| Author | Jane Guill |
| ISBN | 0743264797 |
It is 1351 in Wales, a country subjugated by England, beaten down by superstition, war, and illness. Elise, prone to strange visions and the sole survivor of a plague-ravaged family, has fled her village for distant Conwy with her servant Annora, running from a murder she was forced to commit in self-defense....
| Author | Trezza Azzopardi |
| ISBN | 0802138594 |
A finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, The Hiding Place -- Welsh novelist Trezza Azzopardi's lyrical tale of an immigrant family in Cardiff -- has been compared to Frank McCourt's bleak, stirring memoir Angela's Ashes. But The Hiding Place need not "hide" behind any ready-made comparisons;...
