This book will be released in April 2026.
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Welsh Modern Classics
"Very fine, so truthful-feeling and subtle" – Tessa Hadley
The Rice Paper Diaries was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and won the Wales Book of the Year Award for Fiction.
This is a story of war told from the edges. Four interweaving accounts relate the intimate havoc wrought by military conflict on individual lives.
In 1996 Elsa lies in hospital reflecting on a past full of contrasts of place, language and circumstances, of safety and danger, and the awakening and dying of love.
Back in 1940, far from their west Wales home, Elsa and her first husband, Captain Tommy Jones, had lived the privileged colonial life of Allied civilian ex-patriots in Hong Kong, their experiences both interdependent and contrasting with those of the Chinese who serve them. While news of the war worsens Elsa loses her first child and fault-lines open in the marriage as she becomes aware of Tommy’s increasing interest in another, more sophisticated woman. Then the Japanese soldiers arrive and the Europeans are herded into an internment camp, where the tensions between Elsa and Tommy increase. Later, the difficulties of adjustment to postwar life are subtly delineated, as Elsa, Tommy and their young daughter, Mari return from the Far East to Wales and a changing community.
In this memorable first novel, inspired by the experiences of her great-aunt, Francesca Rhydderch explores with sensitivity and acuity the effects of wartime on an impulsive marriage and the evolving strengths and weaknesses of individuals in the face of crisis.
Francesca Rhydderch is a novelist, translator and short story writer who has previously won the Wales Book of the Year Award for Fiction for her debut The Rice Paper Diaries. Her stories have been widely anthologised and broadcast on Radio Wales and Radio 4. She was short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Award for 'The Taxidermist's Daughter'.
Following a recent medical diagnosis she is learning to live a new life, a quieter existence which brings its own moments of joy. When she isn’t walking or writing at her own pace, she can be found in the company of her friends, family and a dog named Bean.