Happy New Year! Have you blown out the cobwebs yet or are you still in the post Christmas/New Year delirium?
We had a fantastically busy year in 2025, so before we look ahead to the new years let's take a quick wizz around the writing that 2025 brought us.
Tristan Hughes and Tyler Keevil launched their books with style, canoeing the River Avon from Bristol to Bath to Mr's B Emporium Boundary Waters and Take Three Canadians in tow. In line with Richard Burton's centenary celebrations, historian Angela V. John brought out the meticulously researched biography Behind the Scenes bringing the long overdue story of Philip Burton into the limelight. Continuing our Library of Wales series we brought out Goronwy Rees' The Summer Flood, originally published in 1932, and kicking off the start of the Mortymer family saga with the bestselling Rape of the Fair Country by Alexander Cordell, originally published in 1959.
We were delighted to bring Nicol Hochholczerová over from Slovakia for a book tour to celebrate the english translation of This Room Is Impossible to Eat by Julia and Peter Sherwood, including participating in the Uk's first translation festival Translation By, Bristol. We published Carys Shannon's gripping debut Truth Like Water to rave reviews from LoveReading, Buzz Mag and Folding Rock. Carly Holmes delved into the non-fiction world with a tender collection of essays, Love Letters on the River addressed to wildlife and wonder surrounding the River Teifi, beautifully illustrated by Guy Manning.
In poetry we published anticipated collections from Roberto Pastore (Graveyards on Other Planets), Jemma L. King (Moon Base One) and Christina Thatcher (Breaking a Mare) and fresh debuts from Ben Rhys Palmer (Breakfast with the Scavengers) and Tracey Rhys (Bathing on the Roof).
We were also thrilled participate in the Year of Wales and Japan, hosting events in Osaka, Tokyo and Mostyn Hall celebrating the release of The Transplantable Roots of Catherine Huws Nagashima and the new edition of Woman Who Brings the Rain.
Wowee, it has been quite the year with some real gems so do check them out! And you're anything like us there's never a bad reason to get yourself a new book.
2026 Upcoming Releases
It Might Not Be True
Francesca Rhydderch
A memoir of life and love and everything in between.
Francesca Rhydderch is certain that she’s chronically ill, but her doctors disagree. Twelve months later she can’t even walk down the street, and her latest consultant is still suggesting that her neurological problems will just go away on their own. Then she comes across a specialist who changes the course of her illness. She may well be in danger of fighting a losing battle – with time, memory, herself – but she learns there are ways to live in the present by making peace with the past.
White Sheep
Odette Debono
Born into the narrow dockland streets of late-sixties South Wales, Odette longs for escape. She wishes things were different. But what can a child do but dream and hold on? Raised in a mixed heritage family by her single mother, Annette, and her Woodbine-smoking Grandma, she and her two younger sisters must navigate an angry world of booze, prostitution and uncertainty.
This candid and compelling memoir brings the reader up close and personal to the drama and emotional turmoil that pervaded a docklands childhood – but also shines a light on the often funny and mundane moments that are always there – no matter what.
Blueprints
Crystal Jeans
A searing, reflective and truthful collection of essays by award-winning writer, Crystal Jeans, as she explores the struggles of addiction and mental health during the turbulent transition of adolescence into adulthood through to the strains of marriage, childbirth and parenting.
Fiercely feminist, brutally honest and full of sharp cultural references, Blueprints is not another trauma story but a vital validation of the act of writing about pain and loss while grappling with identity in a troubled world.
From Bryony Rheam, the award-winning author of All Come to Dust and This September Sun, comes a collection of sixteen short stories shining a spotlight on life in Zimbabwe over the last twenty years. The daily routines and the greater fate of ordinary Zimbabweans are represented with a deft, compassionate touch and flashes of humour.
From the potholed side streets of Bulawayo to lush, blooming gardens, traversing down- at-heel bars and faded drawing rooms, the stories in The Colonel Comes By ring with hope and poignancy, and pay tribute to the resilience of the human spirit.
Stepsisters: Stories from the Irish
Edited by Brain Ó Conchubhair and Tara Macleod
Stories from Belfast to Kerry, from the immigrant experience to the weight of tradition, these voices refuse easy comfort. They explore the raw territories of motherhood and loss, desire and betrayal, and the clash between old certainties and new realities.
A tattooist claims his lover's skin. A widow faces an impossible choice about her disabled son. Birds of prey stalk through dreams of environmental catastrophe. Here is family in all its beautiful, terrible complexity – the bonds that sustain us, the ones that suffocate, the love that heals, and the secrets that destroy.
Bold, unflinching, and impossible to ignore. Stepsisters showcases the depth and power of contemporary Irish women's writing.
Featuring Éithne Ní Ghallchobhair, Deirdre Brennan, Róise Ní Bhaoill, Biddy Jenkinson, Katherine Duffy and Réaltán Ní Leannáin, Michelle Nic Pháidín, and Majella McDonell.
Unspeakable Beauty
Georgia Carys Williams
Growing up in a lonely house on the edge of a wild common, Violet Hart is a quiet and sheltered only child who has always dreamt of becoming something extraordinary: a ballet icon as famous as Margot Fonteyn.
Guarding her dream closely after suffering catastrophic loss, Violet falls further into quietness, learning to speak only with her feet as she pursues a path to a career in dance. On the cusp of adulthood, she finally starts to find her voice.
But when a secret, all consuming affair with her older lover Theo threatens to send her world into a tailspin, will Violet find herself? Or will she succumb to the silence she knows so well?
My Love all love excels: The Remarkable Life and Times of 17th Century Poet Katherine Philips
Norena Shopland
Katherine Philips has many accolades – the first woman to have a play commercially produced; a seventeenth-century Civil War poet of distinction; someone who broke the rules of poetry; one of the first notable female poets in the world; one of the first to write of same-sex attraction, the list goes on.
As with many early women writers who have been ignored by historians – mostly because they were women – and because of her reputation for female affection, Katherine slipped into obscurity a few decades after her death in 1664.
She lived in violent times; the Civil War pitted families against each other, she was a Royalist while her husband was a Parliamentarian and with the restoration of the monarchy she faced a choice, leave him to his fate or save him. Yet it is her love for two Welsh women that dominated Katherine’s life, and these rollercoaster relations were writ large in her poems to the point where a sex scandal, detailed for the first time in this book, threatened everything. As she and the male poets raced to praise the new monarch, Katherine won, but balanced on the edge of triumph, she lost it all.
Dannie Abse
We are honoured to be reissuing a selection of the work of Dannie Abse in a new series, including his collected poems Ask the Moon and his perennially popular novel Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve. With new introductions from Charlotte Williams, Jasmine Donahaye, Julia Bell and Owen Sheers.
