Cockatrice Books
Y diawl a’m llaw chwith
Cockatrice Books
Featured and New
Since the start of 2015, Cockatrice has been publishing groundbreaking short stories from Wales and beyond, masterful novels, brilliant nonfiction and outstanding scholarship by the best of Welsh authors, original fiction by Rob Mimpriss and A. L. Reynolds, and Roger Granelli and Nigel Jarrett to come. The hell with your red dragon: it’s the cockatrice leads the way.
Any Kind of Broken Man: Collected Stories by Roger Granelli
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
ISBN: 978-1912368327. Format: Paperback, 127×203mm. 248pp. Price: £9.99. DRM-free EPUB Ebook. Price: £2.49
Five Go to Switzerland and Other Stories by Nigel Jarrett
Forthcoming November 2022
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
ISBN: 978-1912368341 Format: Paperback, 127×203mm. 190pp. Price: £8.99
Seaside Towns by A. L. Reynolds
Forthcoming November 2022
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.
ISBN: 978-1912368358. Format: Paperback, 127×203mm. 222pp. Price: £8.99. DRM-free EPUB Ebook. Price: £2.49
Pugnacious Little Trolls by Rob Mimpriss
Nominated for the Wales Book of the Year Award
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.
ISBN: 978-1912368242. Format: Paperback, 127×203mm. 132pp. Price: £6.99
The Sleeping Bard by Ellis Wynne
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.
ISBN: 978-1-912368-31-0. Format: Paperback, 127×203mm. 176pp. Price: £9.99
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, O. M. Edwards, Caradoc Evans, Vsevolod Garshin, Gildas, J. A. Giles, Geraint Goodwin, Roger Granelli, James Harries, Sivert and Elizabeth Hjerleide, T. Gwynn Jones, Richard Hughes Williams, Nigel Jarrett, T. J. Llewelyn Pritchard, J. E. Lloyd, Morgan Llwyd, Rob Mimpriss (editor), George Moore, Nennius, Daniel Owen, Elias Owen, A. L. Reynolds, Phil Rickman, Wirt Sikes, Rowland Smith, Claud Vivian, E. L. Voynich, Leanne Wood, Ellis Wynne, Owen Wynne Jones.
© 2023 Cockatrice Books
