Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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Placing a finger on Welshness
A fascinating and timely collection of essays on identity, writes GAVIN O’TOOLE
BEING WELSH: Suzanne Packer in the BBC drama Casualty; Colin Charvis is the first Black Welsh person to captain the Wales rugby team
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
Welsh [Plural]: Essays on the Future of Wales
Edited by Darren Chetty, Hanan Issa, Grug Muse and Iestyn Tyne
Repeater Books £12.99
IN 1987 as a young reporter on the Western Mail – the self-proclaimed “national” newspaper of Wales – I was tasked with travelling the length of the A470 trunk road joining Cardiff in the south to Llandudno in the north.
It’s an iconic route to the Welsh, arising from the Mail’s own campaign in the 1970s for a single road connecting the country.
I suspect the news editor at the time had other motives – this man could not stand the upstart Cockney in his newsroom, a non-indigenous insult to Welsh journalism, and wanted me out of the office.
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