'Not a writer of one diaspora, but a writer of diasporas.' — Simon Brooks, Barn

Born in London and raised in Ffynnon Taf, on the edge of Cardiff between the city and the valley, Malachy Owain Edwards now writes from the Welsh-speaking heartland as an incomer to it. Paradwys Goll follows him to Barbados in search of his grandfather Kenrick, and to Ireland after the other half of his inheritance. Along the way come Windrush and The Lonely Londoners, a border officer in Barbados telling him he does not 'look Black', and a racist attack in Wales because he is.

Told in an unhurried, restrained style that lets small things — the history of a watch — carry large significance, the book is life-writing, travel writing and family history at once. Reviewing it in Barn, Simon Brooks read it as an answer to Deleuze and Guattari's claim that minor literature cannot be written in a minority language: this is Welsh-language writing as many-sided, international and anti-essentialist as anything from a metropolis.

At a moment when every European nation is reckoning with its colonial past, it offers the rare view from a country that is both minoritised and implicated.