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Seven Days 'an exhilarating read' – Wales Arts Review
'Seven Days: A Pyrenean Adventure by Nathan Munday is an exhilarating read, beautifully written by an author of genuine originality. Munday’s debut announces him as a exciting and genre bridging author.' – Cynan Llwyd admires Nathan Munday's debut on Wales Arts Review
Nathan Munday’s Seven Days is a story of adventure and spirituality as father and son travel the 'Rue du Bonjour' across the pilgrim route of the high Pyrenees. It is a journey with a writer grappling with some of the questions of modern life, his love for the mountains, his beliefs and aspirations and examples set both by his father and the enigmatic fellow traveller they meet in a remote auberge who comes to symbolise and shadow their sojourn, a man he nicknames Hemingway, although he is neither a writer nor an American. Read an extract on Wales Arts Review.
Join us in Cardiff for Book Launch: Nathan Munday – Seven Days on 14 November, The City Parish of St John the Baptist, 7pm.
Free entry and tea or mulled wine.
Sophie McKeand and The Stories They Would Tell
Trees have rooted into our consciousness for as long as we have told stories. Their language holds the ground that is our past while stretching our minds up to the sky and future potential. Trees are our lungs; the words in our mouths; they are our confidants and friends. If the trees speak in myriad ways – is it us who have forgotten how to listen? After everything they’ve seen what would the trees tell us? In association with Bute Park and the Tree Charter, award-winning poet and Young People’s Laureate Wales, Sophie McKeand (Rebel Sun), will be on site...
Books Without Borders Bookclub read The Women Who Blow on Knots
The following guest post is provided by Claire Houguez, former Parthian staff, who attended the Books Without Borders Bookclub event in London. I take the lift up to the fifteenth floor of Saint Georges Hotel. It’s apt that we’re meeting here because, as is gleefully noted by organiser Philip, a hotel of the same name is referenced in The Women Who Blow on Knots, the book we’re here to discuss. Philip is already seated at the reserved table when I arrive and he greets me with fresh coffee. We marvel at the scenic cityscape through the large windows. Philip started...
New Welsh Review Blog: Better Houses by Susie Wild
'Better Houses is about the places we inhabit in life, about relationships and the extraordinary in the everyday. It has all the key subjects: birth, death, sex, love and loss. At the book’s core, it is as much about moving house as it is about trying to centre yourself somewhere, to find a place to call home, to be still. I have moved at least every six months to two years in my adult life, sometimes through choice and often not. This draws on those experiences of packing and unpacking boxes, but it also employs fiction, humour and imagination. Other poems escape fires and great white sharks, test beds and language barriers and hunt fossils and comets, spells and adventures...'
Read the blog in full on the New Welsh Review website.
Buy Better Houses from the Parthian online shop for £8.99 and free P&P
New Welsh Review Blog: Table Talk by Nathan Munday
'I was in the south of France recently and visited the chateau at Pau where Henri IV was born. They supposedly used a tortoise shell as his cradle and the whole castle has become a memorial to that monarch who famously said: ‘Paris is worth a mass’, having renounced his Protestant faith for the French throne. We were on a guided tour, and to be honest, I was not that interested in the shell, the King, the gold frames and mirrors. What did draw my attention was… a big table. I think it was one of the biggest tables I had ever seen! Apparently, it could seat one hundred guests and I started imagining the noise, the food, and all the table talk that would have taken place around it...'
