In Celtic legend, animals and birds are everywhere. Here the creatures tell the stories themselves.

Twelve Celtic legends, retold in the voices of the animals and birds who move through them. Branwen's starling carries her message across the Irish Sea to her brother; Melangell's hare seeks sanctuary; the chough remembers the blood that stained its beak and legs red; the Twrch Trwyth simply runs. Each creature tells not only its story, but what it felt, and notes at the back explain where each tale comes from and what the animal meant to the Celts.

The collection gathers the six Celtic nations of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man with a tale apiece from eleven of the best-known writers working in Welsh today. Elin Manon's illustrations carry as much of the storytelling as the words, and Olwen Fowler's design sets the text inside the pictures.

The stories are old; the voices telling them are not. What the book offers a buyer is a shared Celtic inheritance that reaches well beyond Wales, and in the illustrations, a gift book that will sell on sight.