Our Bookshelf
Browse our Bookshelves, selected annually by the Exchange as a window to recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation.
“Isabel Adonis has created an extraordinary narrative, a swirling and circling story of language and heroism, of the many oppositions shaping her life and choices.”
Sarah Tanburn, Nation Cymru
“It is in many ways a dark tale, but its heart and its humanity gives it great power.”
Paul Theroux
“…the freshest, most exquisitely written, most observant, complex and insightful cultural memoir ever written about growing up in North Wales. I thoroughly recommend it to you.”
Jim Perrin
And: a memoir of my mother
Winner of the 2023 Wales Book of the Year | Creative Non-Fiction
Simultaneously personal and universal, and told in the rhythms of an oral story, this beautifully musical and multi-layered book examines the divisiveness of colour, alienation, the impact of colonialism on social culture, and what it means to be ‘mixed’.
Isabel Adonis was born in London in 1951, to Welshwoman Catherine Alice Hughes, and renowned Guyanese artist Denis Williams, whose work has been exhibited in the Tate Gallery.
Growing up in London, Sudan and Wales, with a cold and distant father and an isolated mother, Adonis explores the nature of identity, culture and desire as shaped by her childhood impressions of her parents.
An essential read that portrays an important aspect of the culturally diverse social fabric of Wales and the wider world.
- Black Bee Books (2022)
Black Bee Books
Reviews
“Isabel Adonis has created an extraordinary narrative, a swirling and circling story of language and heroism, of the many oppositions shaping her life and choices.”
Read more reviewsSarah Tanburn, Nation Cymru