Get 15% off all pre-orders of Parthian's 2025 new releases, offer ends on 25/12/24. Just use code ADVENT13 at the checkout.
We've got lots to look forward to in the new year so get ahead of your 2025 reading goals and get 15% off all the books below and more. All pre-orders are charged at time of order and the book will be posted to you as soon as it becomes available.
This Room Is Impossible To Eat by Nicol Hochholczerová. Translated by Peter and Julia Sherwood
Tereza and Ivan share secrets. Tereza is now in art school away from the town where she grew up. Ivan is a teacher and artist. Tereza is now nineteen, Ivan is fifty-seven. They have known each other for years.
Tereza shares her secrets with her friend Silvia. Ivan does not tell anyone. He constructs memories of Tereza to keep in his bed at night, covering them with sweat and tears.
In this minimalist, poetic novella with autobiographical elements Nicol Hochholczerová weaves a story of obsession and power and how both can lead to damage and separation. Rich with symbolism, its explosive themes – of eating disorders, abusive control and family dysfunction – are delicately handled with honesty and intelligence.
Lower Canada, 1804.
Arthur Stanton, lacking direction in his life and desperately seeking the approval of his father, wanders the streets of Montreal filled with daydreams of exotic lands and adventures inspired by novels and traveller’s tales. On a sudden whim he decides to sign up as a clerk in the fur trade and is sent on a mission to recover a cache of furs obtained from a secret beaver El Dorado. Accompanied by a down-at-heel band of voyageurs, led by a disgraced and drunken trader, he embarks on a journey by birchbark canoe into the northern wilderness.
Paddling from Lachine to Lake Superior, and then across the unresolved border between Canada and the United States, Arthur’s travels will take him into a series of baffling new worlds, where he will prove himself to be hapless in trade, hopeless in love, and terrified of the landscapes and peoples that surround him. Stumbling from one mishap into another, he will at last fall into disaster, seemingly betray his friends and companions, and have to begin a quest to set things right.
The Transplantable Roots of Catharine Huws Nagashima: Encounters with the Welsh in Japan by Susan Karen Burton
Since the first ‘Welch’ sailor set foot on Japanese shores in the seventeenth century to the present-day presence of high-tech Japanese companies in the Valleys, Wales and Japan are two nations with deeply entwined roots.
Captured in this groundbreaking book is a chorus of modern-day Welsh migrants to Japan. There is Catharine who, in 1965, followed her Japanese husband to an ‘out of kilter’ house in the seaside town of Zushi; Jac, the ‘capitalist ski bum’, who guides tourists through the bear-infested wilds of snowy Hokkaidō, while on a volcanic island in the Seto Inland Sea, Simon clears jungle vines to develop his vegan farm.
Fresh, engaging, with a strong sense of space and place, but above all, a knack for crafting a life story, this volume of documentary literature presents universal themes of work, adventure, reinvention and survival. Here are people discovering and negotiating the land, the life and the culture of Japan, and putting down ‘transplantable roots’.
Behind the Scenes: The Dramatic Lives of Philip Burton by Angela V. John
Philip Burton (1904-95) is best remembered as the schoolmaster responsible for training and transforming his pupil Richard Jenkins into Richard Burton, world-famous star of stage and screen. Together they produced a remarkable symbiosis. The stage-struck Philip Burton was present behind the scenes for the rest of the actor’s life, intervening at crucial moments to ensure consummate stage performances in, for example, Coriolanus, Hamlet and Camelot. This biography, drawing upon a number of previously unseen sources, provides a fresh angle on this compelling story. And by placing Philip Burton’s story centre stage, a remarkable figure also emerges in his own right. In a life that virtually spanned the twentieth century, he demonstrated resilience and transatlantic triumph against the odds.
Street Fighting and Other Times by Dai Smith
An essential collection, Street Fighting and Other Past Times is a moving study of life, love, memory and loss. A late, but not too late, first poetry collection, from one of the leading literary interpreters of the South Welsh experience.
For readers who are interested in both the pre- and post-devolutionary cultural landscape of Wales, this is a crucial addition to the canon of Welsh writing in English, crowning and celebrating a life filled with enriching work at the coal-face of Welsh culture.
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