In this collection of short stores, Lewis Davies takes us on a journey Sri Lanka, Wales, Spain, India, Morocco and the lives and minds of his characters.

These elegant, bittersweet tales transform the everyday into the magical, and vice versa, casting a new light on the world.

Long-listed for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2011

Fiction Book of the Year, Welsh Icons Awards 2010

Book of the Month, Buzz Magazine, October 2010

In this collection of short stores, Lewis Davies takes us on a journey Sri Lanka, Wales, Spain, India, Morocco and the lives and minds of his characters.

These elegant, bittersweet tales transform the everyday into the magical, and vice versa, casting a new light on the world.

"the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable book yet seen in English" Westminster Gazette, 1894

“one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language” Stephen King, 2008

Wales' greatest master of the macabre and mystical, Arthur Machen was born Arthur Llewelyn Jones in Caerleon, and grew up to become one of the most influential and original writers of his generation.

"The fiction establishes him as the supreme chronicler of (post-war) South Wales valley life, and his fascinating account of his upbringing in English-speaking Pontypridd raises questions about the complex plurality of modern Wales which still command serious attention." The New Companion to the Literature of Wales

At the heart of Dai Country - the central valleys of twentieth-century South Wales from the 1930s to the 1970s - was the metropolis of Pontypridd.