Winner of the 2024 Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award

In this warm personal account, author Iwan Rhys documents with rare sensitivity and insight his experience of crossing the threshold into the role of stepfather. As he negotiates a new life as stepfather to two young boys – drawn into a family life divided between Caernarfon and Berlin – he negotiates too the questions that his circumstances demand of him: Who am I on this new hearth? What is my role?

Such weighty reflections are held with the lightest of touches, as well as a poet’s ear for language and an eye for the joyful mundanities of life. This unique portrait of a new family’s life is a delightful, witty read, and captures an experience so rarely celebrated in literature.