New and Forthcoming

Since the start of 2015, Cockatrice Books has been publishing ground-breaking short stories from Wales and beyond, masterful novels, brilliant nonfiction and outstanding scholarship representing the best of Welsh literature from the 7th Century to the 20th, along with challenging fiction by Roger Granelli, Nigel Jarrett, A. L. Reynolds and Rob Mimpriss. The hell with your red dragon – it’s the Cockatrice leads the way.

Any Kind of Broken Man: Collected Stories by Roger Granelli

With a foreword by Phil Rickman

A veteran of the war with Japan confronts the Japanese factory which has revivified his valley. An ageing Navajo on the edge of the desert meets his doctor son’s white bride. A young jazz musician walks into a club with a pistol in his pocket, and a young criminal from the valleys who is suspected of murder finds peace of mind on a Scottish beach.

Grounded in the post-industrial communities of Wales, yet encompassing Spain, Malaysia and the Florida Keys, this collection spans the career of a prominent novelist from the early 1990s to the present day. Drug dealers, labourers, invalids and war criminals confront the start of a new century, the death of old certainties and old ways of life, the comforting weight of bitterness and the fearful beginnings of hope.

‘Roger Granelli’s books are incredibly hard to put down.’

The Big Issue

‘His characters breathe, make you care. One day the people that count will realise that Roger Granelli is… the best un-sung novelist in Wales.’

Phil Rickman

‘Granelli has a gift for making characters emerge, for letting actions speak for themselves.’

New Welsh Review

Seaside Towns by A. L. Reynolds

For Anatoliy Yetvushenko, émigré and physicist, it should be the perfect holiday. Llandudno calls to his mind the Black Sea holidays of his childhood in the Ukraine, while his companion, Francis, is just beginning to awaken to the possibilities of male sexual love in the first years following its legalisation. But Anatoliy has memories of an earlier holiday in Lyme Regis in the 1950s, where his previous lover, who now lives near Llandudno, left him to make a loveless marriage. With its awareness of the landscape of the north coast of Wales, of quantum physics and of deep time, this novel reflects the search for intimacy and fulfilment in the shadow of political tyranny and sexual persecution.

‘gentle yet searing, introspective yet intensely physical. A real gem of a book… Seek it out if you can.’

Rachel Rees, Buzz Magazine

‘the wonder, the intensity, the profound gratitude of [sexual love]… the intimately human [cast] in an epic light, in the awesome interconnectedness of all’

Niall Griffiths, Nation Cymru

Five Go to Switzerland & Other Stories by Nigel Jarrett

A daughter curious about her widowed father’s love life; a woman survivor of domestic abuse; a wife who learns something startling about her jazz-loving husband at his funeral; an old actor facing memory loss; a couple whose son was executed by militants; a black American academic staying in Wordsworth country while his university investigates a student complaint; an early 20th-century scullery maid being taught to read by a sinister manservant… and more.

In his fourth wide-ranging and vivid collection, award-winning writer Nigel Jarrett disturbs the clear, slow-flowing waters of ordinary lives to reveal their complications and unresolved tensions, and to celebrate those who emerge from tribulation chastened but unvanquished.

‘Here are vivid and vital stories that crackle like bushfire and ignite delight… I read them with unbridled pleasure and holy envy.’

Jon Gower

‘Jarrett’s stories take seemingly ordinary or innocent situations and gently tease out their emotional complexity.’

Lesley McDowell, The Independent

‘Explaining what Jarrett does with language is a bit like trying to map gossamer with a chunky felt-tip.’

Mary-Ann Constantine

Pugnacious Little Trolls by Rob Mimpriss

Nominated for the Wales Book of the Year Award

A White Review Book of the Year for 2023

In his first three short-story collections, Rob Mimpriss painstakingly mapped the unregarded lives of Welsh small-town and country-dwellers. In Pugnacious Little Trolls, he combines the skill and quiet eloquence of his earlier work with confident experimentation, with stories set among the bird-bodied harpies of Central America, among the dog-headed Cynocephali of Central Asia, among humanity’s remote descendants at the very end of the universe, and in the muddle of slag-heaps and job centres that H. G. Wells’s Country of the Blind has become. In the three stories at the heart of the collection is Tanwen, idealistic and timid, embarking on her adult life in the shadow of global warming and English nationalism.

‘Where is the Welsh short story going? Wherever Rob Mimpriss takes it.’

John O’Donoghue

‘freely and fiercely inventive short stories… supercharged with ideas’

Jon Gower, Nation Cymru

‘Beyond question Wales’s finest and most subtle short-story writer working today… A work of great beauty and subtle force, a fine, distinctive voice.’

Jim Perrin

‘bathed in white fire in every sense… Borges would happily own them.’

Gee Williams

Published as part of the Wales in Europe series: celebrating the past and future of Wales as an independent nation.

The Sleeping Bard by Ellis Wynne

Translated by T. Gwynn Jones, with an introduction by Rob Mimpriss

Three nightmare visions of the world, of death and of hell.

The anonymous poet is dragged from sleep by the fairies of Welsh myth, and rescued by an angel is taken to see the City of Doom, whose citizens vie for the favour of Belial’s three beautiful daughters; to the realm of King Death, the rebellious vassal of Lucifer; and finally to Hell itself, where Lucifer debates with his demons which sin shall rule Great Britain.

First published in 1703, this classic of religious allegory and Welsh prose combines all the blunt urgency of John Bunyan with the vivid social satire of Dryden and Pope, and is published in the T. Gwynn Jones translation of 1940, with an introduction by Rob Mimpriss reflecting on its political significance as the union of England and Scotland comes to an end.

Published as part of the Wales in Europe series, celebrating the past and future of Wales as an independent nation.