This book will be released in August 2026.
Pre-orders are charged at time of order and the book will be posted to you as soon as it becomes available.
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The latest title in the Library of Wales series
Foreword by Katherine Stansfield
“One of the most accomplished examples of twentieth-century Welsh Female Gothic.” – Kirsti Bohata, Female Gothic: New Directions
“The novel is painstakingly constructed [...] The humour wonderfully black.” – John Hanratty, Books Ireland
Fleeing from herself and the trappings of her previous life, Ann Thomas takes up residency at an outlandish crumbling hotel in the heartland of Wales as she awaits a life-changing operation.
Illuminated by the distant glow of the Welsh firebombers, Ann’s tenure at the hotel, which is full of secret passageways and inexplicable voids, pipes and sounds from the attic, entangles her life into that of its strange inhabitants; who include an outrageous con man and a grimly funny drunk. The hotel’s insolent staff and a fanatic nationalist lure her further into a mysterious shadowland, where the hotel assumes a character of its own and a life riven with nefarious activities.
Mary Jones was born in Aberystwyth in 1942 and was educated in St Padarn’s Convent School before studying English under William Empson at Sheffield University. After graduation she did a year’s voluntary service overseas in Ramallah, Jordan, before returning to Sheffield University to do an MA by research on the writings of David Jones. In 1969 she was appointed lecturer in English at the University of Ulster where she worked until retirement in 2002. Resistance, her first and only novel, was originally published in 1985 by The Blackstaff Press and won the Welsh Arts Council Fiction Prize in 1986. Mary Jones lives in County Antrim.