Alys Conran's Pigeon has been reviewed very favourably by Hannah Hayden for Structo magazine.Highlights from the review include Hayden's statement that 'Pigeon offers us stirring meditations on language: that it is laced with history, diegeses are built with words, and that one’s language and one’s story are bound together. Reading Pigeon, one feels the collision of past stories and the attempt to move forward, making peace with the words that created a history'. She also praises Conran's use of language, saying the narrative 'moves between English and Welsh fluidly and cohesively', with the Welsh being 'contextually discernible without lacking in subtlety', and draws comparisons between Pigeon and How to Kill a Mockingbird.
Hayden concludes by calling Conran's novel 'a testament to the visceral nature of one’s own language versus the flexible formality of a presentational language, and how the two function differently in truth telling, tall-tale telling, and comforting others'.
You can read the full review here.
Pigeon is the tragic, occasionally hilarious and ultimately intense story of a childhood friendship and how it's torn apart, a story of guilt, silence and the loss of innocence, and a story about the kind of love which may survive it all.
Alys Conran's fiction, poetry, and translations have been placed in several competitions, including The Bristol Short Story Prize and The Manchester Fiction Prize. Having previously studied Literature at Edinburgh, she completed her MA in Creative Writing at Manchester. She also ran projects to increase access to creative writing and reading among traditionally excluded groups in North Wales. She was recently awarded a scholarship to write a second novel.
You can read more information about/order Pigeon here.
