Our Bookshelf
Browse our Bookshelves, selected annually by the Exchange as a window to recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation.
“Finding a distinctive voice that stands out and speaks clearly is an essential test for a novelist, and it's one that Welsh artist and writer Anthony Shapland effortlessly passes in his impressive debut... Memorable, striking, dark, beautiful and one of the best debuts I've read in years.”
John Self, The Observer
“Anthony's writing is unique, sparse and poetic - a true art in itself - and this is not to be missed.”
Buzz Magazine
“[An] utterly unique experience... This is a book of deep importance to Wales' hidden histories.”
Stephen Price, Nation.Cymru
“With its poignant rendering of a loving relationship undertaken against great odds, compounded by a hostile political climate, A Room Above a Shop is a powerful and luminously pure novel. At 53, Shapland has arrived with his talent fully formed.”
Jude Cook, The Guardian
“To read A Room Above a Shop is to feel held within the hands of a master craftsman in control of his form. This is truly an impressive debut … with a poeticism unmatched in modern Welsh writing.”
Joshua Jones, author of Local Fires
A Room Above a Shop
From an essential new voice in Welsh literature, an atmospheric and poignant story of a relationship between two small-town Valleys men during the late 1980s.
When two quiet men form a tentative connection neither knows where it might lead. M has inherited his family’s ironmongery business and B is younger by eleven years and can see no future in the place where he has grown up, but when M offers him a job and lodgings, he accepts. As the two men work side by side in the shop, they also begin a life together in their one shared room above – the kind of life they never imagined possible and that risks everything if their public performance were to slip.
Unfolding in South Wales against the backdrop of Section 28, the age of consent debate and the HIV and AIDS crisis, this is a tender and resonant love story, and a powerful debut.
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Granta Books (2025)
978 - 1803511603
160pp
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Granta Books (2025)
For US rights contact the author’s agent, Cathryn Summerhayes at Curtis Brown: Cathryn.summerhayes@curtisbrown.co.uk and for translation rights contact Georgie Mellor georgie.mellor@curtisbrown.co.uk
Volume, serial, and eBook rights in the UK and British Commonwealth: are held by the publisher
France
Reviews
“Finding a distinctive voice that stands out and speaks clearly is an essential test for a novelist, and it's one that Welsh artist and writer Anthony Shapland effortlessly passes in his impressive debut... Memorable, striking, dark, beautiful and one of the best debuts I've read in years.”
Read more reviewsJohn Self, The Observer