This book will be released in March 2025.
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Winner of the New Welsh Writing Awards 2017
In this atmospheric novella, the mysterious Plankton Collector visits members of a family torn apart by grief and regret. He comes in different guises. For ten-year-old Mary, he is Mr Smith who takes her on a train journey to the seaside. Her mother, Rose, meets him as Stephen, by her son’s graveside. Rose’s youngest, Bunny, encounters him as the gardener. For husband and father David, meanwhile, the meeting is with a love from his youth. And long-lost Uncle Barnaby takes the children for a week’s holiday during which their parents begin a reconciliation. All visitors are manifestations of the Plankton Collector who teaches those he encounters the difference between the discarded weight of unhappy memories and the lightness borne by happiness recalled.
“Painterly... lush dreamy prose creates a vivid landscape, while its lyricism transports the reader. Cleverly creates a universe of new realities.” – Cathryn Summerhayes, literary agent at Curtis Brown
“Haunts like memory, shimmering in and out of love and loss with unexpected, poignant hope. Richly lyrical, beautifully original.” – Helen Sedgwick
Cath Barton won the New Welsh Writing AmeriCymru Prize for the Novella 2017 for The Plankton Collector, which was first published in September 2018 by New Welsh Review. It was given a special mention in the Saboteur Awards Best Novella category 2019. Cath’s further novellas are In the Sweep of the Bay (2020, Louise Walters Books), Between the Virgin and the Sea (2023, Novella Express, Leamington Books) and The Geography of the Heart (2023, Arroyo Seco Press). A pamphlet of her short stories, Mr Bosch and His Owls, was published in 2024 by Atomic Bohemian. Cath lives in Abergavenny.