Seren: 87 books

The fauverie of this poetry book is the big-cat house in the Jardin des Plantes zoo. But the word also evokes the Fauves, "primitive" painters who used raw color straight from the tube. This volume has childhood trauma and a dying father at its heart, while Paris takes center stage—a city...

This darkly gothic collection of stories explores the unsettling borderland between reality and the supernatural. Ranging from early twentieth-century France to 1960s South Wales and contemporary Europe, Jo Mazelis' singular vision and poetic language creates characters caught up in events and...

Drawing from two medieval Welsh manuscripts with roots dating back many centuries earlier, this series of 11 stories sheds light on Celtic mythology and Arthurian romance while providing a new perspective on Great Britain itself. From enchantment and shapeshifting to the age-old dichotomies of conflict...

Masque is a richly gothic retelling of Gaston Leroux's phantom of the opera story by debut novelist Bethany W Pope. Centre stage is would-be opera singer Christine, who, despite being devoted to her art, attracts the attention of both the Phantom, and rich theatre owner Raoul. The resulting mix of love, rage, art and murderous intent, is explosive.

Conducting a journey from boyhood to manhood, this is the revealing autobiography of poet Andrew McNeillie. From an airplane crossing north Wales, the middle-aged writer looks down on the countryside of his childhood in this fascinating memoir, recalling an almost fabulous world now lost to him. From...

Inspired by her years as an Immigration Caseworker to one of the most diverse inner-city areas in the UK, Caroline Smith has written a collection of poems, The Immigration Handbook, that details the many troubling and moving incidents in the lives of those she tries to help. This is a book that reaches out of the headlines into our hearts.

Often dark, with a concise and compelling style, this collection of poems brings together a variety of voices—dodos and wallpaper chant obsessively, a pair of shoes haunts a murderer’s moll, a cheese weeps for the calf whose milk it stole, an army cook laments the dead, and a woman turned into...

"..both tales include passages of razor-sharp humour as well as great beauty and poignancy..." - New Welsh Review Iraq-bound young squaddie Ronnie takes something dodgy and falls asleep for three nights in a filthy hovel where he has the strangest of dreams. He watches the tattoed tribes...

Kim Moore, in her lively debut poetry collection, sets out her stall in the opening poems, firmly in the North amongst 'My People': "who swear without knowing they are swearing… scaffolders and plasterers and shoemakers and carers…". The poet's voice is direct, rhythmic, compelling....

Animal People is the new collection by the distinguished poet Carol Rumens. Often inspired by and infused with the weathers of various seasons of the year, a strong sense of place also features in most poems, whether it be the dramatic mountain rock-scapes of Snowdonia or the gritty streets of London....

The largely straightforward narrative in this remarkably assured debut poetry collection from a young Welsh poet is compellingly interlaced with often-elaborate and strange textures and imagery. The rich surface is undercut by a mix of rebellious energy and unflinching satire that manifests itself...

A poet known for her fierce confessional style focuses on her passion for the natural world in this startling collection of vignettes influenced by California's giant redwood trees. These lyrical, resonant, strange, and imaginative poems echo in the mind and leave an indelible impression of the mysterious...

With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, Damian Walford Davies's Witch offers a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century. The poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections,...

Gentle but haunting, this selection of short stories takes a closer look at the importance of parental and filial love down the generations. The protagonists reminisce over the pattern of their lives, looking back as well as forward, for the chance to rekindle lost loves and find a home for themselves....