Browse our Bookshelves, selected annually by the Exchange as a window to recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation.
"Beautifully subtle and moving, vivid in its painful present and reaching deep into the past…"Tessa Hadley
"A delicate masterpiece… A quiet, clear-eyed mediation on family, childhood, illness, grief, literature and love. Moving and illuminating in equal measure."Owen Sheers
“This evocative little gem truly provides a life lesson.”Charlotte Williams
A memoir about the intertwining of memory and the body.
When the author Francesca Rhydderch begins to experience mysterious and debilitating symptoms that doctors believe to be neurological, she finds herself not only fighting for answers in the present but also sifting through her past. As we flit between her childhood home and NHS waiting rooms, between Llanelli, New Quay and Cardiff, Rhydderch creates a portrait of a family in fragments. We see the lives of her parents, the glamorous, exciting Toots and solid, seafaring Dad, her childhood with her two sisters and brother, the gap left by her parent’s untimely death and her life in Cardiff with her own two children. These portraits of life and love are intertwined with the author’s own fight for answers about what is happening to her body and mind, for diagnosis, and for a way to live in her new future.
Parthian Books (07/05/2026)
ISBN 9781913830540
148pp
Richard Davies, Parthian Books: rich_parthian@yahoo.co.uk
"Beautifully subtle and moving, vivid in its painful present and reaching deep into the past…"
Tessa HadleyRead more reviews