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For around twenty years, Nick Fisk believed that one day he would find a letter on his doormat from Cardiff City FC requesting his services on the football pitch. When he realised it was unlikely he was ever going to be offered the role of groundsman, he decided the next best thing would be to write about the club instead.A former member of the not especially notorious non-hooligan gang, The Sad Crew, Fisk has plenty of experience to draw from, in terms of going to football matches, and coming up with ridiculous chants that nobody ever joins in with.In The Blues Are Back in Town Nick charts the 2014/15 season, following the team and its fans, and trying to rediscover his passion for the recently relegated club, while at the same time, reflecting on the good old days. The blog he kept, The Fisk Report, gave an insight into not just what it's like to be a typical fan, but what supporting The Bluebirds is like through the eyes of a Fisk.It is a funny, enigmatic and personal book about the passion and belief of being a football fan.

It's the summer of 1916 and the Alexandrov family prepare to embark on their annual holiday, accompanied by an army of staff primed to cater to their needs.Teenage, precocious Alyosha Alexandrov has never known anything but a life of privilege. He spends his days avoiding study and pursuing pretty young maids. But Russia is poised on the brink of epochal political upheaval and within a year Alyosha is separated from family, security, and the innocence of youth.Set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, spanning the turbulent years from 1916 to 1924, Petrograd is a vast, ambitious novel from an award-winning writer. The first in a trilogy, and winner of the Wales Book of the Year Award (Welsh Language), it tells the compelling, convincing story of the Alexandrov family as they each struggle to adapt to the ravages of war and revolution.

'Important and highly readable....of interest around the world because it enables the reader to see education reform from a minister's perspective as very few books have done before.' - Sir Michael BarberMinistering to Education is the first book by a former Welsh Government Minister since the creation of the National Assembly in 1999. As Education Minister in the Welsh Government from 2009-2013, Leighton Andrews was twice named Welsh Politician of the Year. This is his enlightening, frank and readable account of the education reforms initiated in the early years of Carwyn Jones's period as First Minister, and the complex challenges that still lie ahead to make the Welsh education system as good as any in the world.Offering the inside story on the reform journey Wales embarked upon, Andrews controversially reveals how he deliberately brought the media into the debate on school ranking. He debates the decision to regrade exam results when English Language GCSE exams came under fire in 2012, and the effect such decisions have had in setting the education systems of England and Wales on diverging paths. Student tuition fees were another area where Andrews led Wales in a different direction from England. Following Michael Gove's departure as Westminster Education Secretary, Andrews questions whether Wales or England has fared better and suggests what should happen next.

The exploits of the people's heroes from Gould to Gareth Edwards are vividly recaptured in some classic prose. So too are the expectations and emotions of the most passionate followers in the world in this selection of world-beating writing on Welsh rugby: The First XV.

A Time to Laugh is set in a coal-mining valley on the eve of the 20th century against a background of industrial unrest and social change.The old certainties of pastoral Rhondda have given way to a new age of capital and steam, and life in the Valley has been transformed by strike, riot and gruelling poverty. Tudor Morris, a young doctor, has returned to the valley where his father has a practice, and is immediately drawn into the tumult and excitement of the fight for fair pay and conditions. He is expected to marry his childhood sweetheart Mildred, the daughter of a local solicitor but he is inexorably drawn to the passionate ideals and charms of Daisy, the sister of one of the leaders of the workers movement. Is Tudor going to follow the conventions of his class or break with tradition or gamble his life and future with the fortunes of the struggle of the people?

Have you been chosen to chair a group or a meeting for the first time?In the Chair is a practical, up-to-date and comprehensive guide to how to become the successful Chair of any body, whether it's the organisation you work for, a community group or charity, or a public or company Board. What qualities and skills do you need? How should you approach your group and its members? How should you prepare for and conduct meetings? How do you arrive at decisions, and cope with difficult situations and people?Inside you will find invaluable advice on chairing formal Boards and working with Chief Executives, as well as how to approach special kinds of meeting, including formal and public meetings, conferences, appointment panels, bilingual meetings and videoconferences.In the Chair will benefit anyone keen to make participating in groups and meetings a productive and enjoyable experience.

Composite novel Dream On is a black comedy, a flashlight noir thriller, and a meditation on the lives and stories that connect up the frayed wires in the business of living: of Digger Davies and his one cap for Wales and ultimately untimely death...and the award-winning photographer whose return home will become a quest for his own forgotten identity and compromised life...the thwarted politician in a hospital bed writing his own obituary...and a beautiful girl caught in time, alive in an old man's memory...

This rich biography tells the remarkable tale of Margaret Haig Thomas who became the Viscountess Rhondda. She was a Welsh suffragette, held important posts during the First World War and survived the sinking of the Lusitania.

Wiltshire 1860: One year after Darwin's explosive publication of The Origin of Species, sisters Anna and Beatrice Pentecost awaken to a world shattered by science, radicalism and the stirrings of feminist rebellion; a world of charismatic religious movements, Spiritualist seances, bitter loss and medical trauma.Fetishist of working women Arthur Munby, irascible antiquary General Pitt Rivers, feminist Barbara Bodichon and other historical figures of the Victorian epoch wander through the backdrop of the novel, as Anna's anomalous love for Lore Ritter and her friendship with freethinking and ambitious Miriam Sala carry her into areas of uncharted desire while Beatrice, forced to choose between her beloved Will Anwyl and the evangelist Christian Ritter, who marked her out as a wife when she was only a child, is pulled between passion and duty. Each is riven by inner contradictions, but who will survive when the sisters fall into a fatal conflict with one another?

I am the laugh of a kookaburra. I am a currawong. I am a galah. I am a lyre because I am a lyrebird. I am a performer and I am superb...Georgia Carys Williams' stories are dark, offbeat, rippling with watery memories and poetic unease. From the bluest Venetian lagoon where a merwoman saves a drowning gondolier to a glass harmonica playing itself along a tideline.Williams is a writer for whom the world is never the safe place: a phantom baby growing older, a granddaughter obsessively peeling tangerines, and a deaf sister conducting music in her sleep are all brought to life in an innovative and perceptive collection from a distinctive new voice.

New York, May, 1950. A warm Spring day and a thirty-five year old Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, pushes through the revolving doors of Harper's Bazaar. There, he meets Miss Pearl Kazin, Fiction Editor, highly-educated and out to make her own mark on New York. One side of their correspondence has survived: six love letters, never before published.

Up ahead, Helen saw the police line harden into a barricade of bodies and shields. Resin batons thudded on Perspex shields; slow, thuggish, brutal. Goosebumps studded her arms and legs. Her pace slowed to the truncheons' beat. Mary halted a yard from the riot shields, raised her megaphone. 'We are women from Ystrad an' from all over Wales,' she said. 'We are here to make peaceful protest. Here in solidarity with the men.' The drumming quickened.Trouble is brewing in Ystrad. It is time to defend jobs, the pits and a way of life that has formed both the life of valley and the nation.The union is squaring up to the Coal Board, the government and the country. Gwyn Pritchard, overman at Blackthorn colliery, believes that the way to save his pit is to keep his men working and production high. His men disagree and when an old collier dies on Gwyn's shift, the men's simmering resentment spills over into open defiance.But Gwyn faces a challenge at home too. His daughter Helen is in love with a fiery young collier, Scrapper Jones. In March 1984, when miners across the country walk out to join what will become a year-long strike, Scrapper throws himself into the struggle and Helen joins the women, preparing food for the soup kitchen and standing with the men on the picket line.Scrapper, Helen and Gwyn must decide which side they are on as the dispute drives the Pritchard family apart and the Jones family to ruin.What matters most: to be right, to be loved or to belong?Until our Blood is Dry is a novel of passion and love, betrayal and decisions in a time and a place when a people were forced to fight for their future.

The Library of Wales' Story anthologies feature the very best of Welsh short fiction, written amid the political, social and economic turbulence of twentieth century Wales.

The Library of Wales' Story anthologies feature the very best of Welsh short fiction, written amid the political, social and economic turbulence of twentieth century Wales and beyond.

Travel to the revolutionary closing years of 18th century England. Meet Jack Cockshutt, arsonist by trade, returning to rescue his victims and profit from their relief, finding the woman who just might save him. Meet the beauty who castigates her customers with passages from Paine's Rights of Man; the boy who raises the tricolour on the White Tower; the labourer contracted to spend seven years locked up beneath a dilettante's country house. Meet Lappish women. Glimpse the picnic party of the Ottoman ambassador.A stunning new voice emerges with these strange and gemlike stories.

Never before published, written 'at white-heat in three weeks' in autumn 1967 after two visits to the detention island of Leros in the Greek Dodecanese, The Protagonists is Chamberlain's response to the right-wing Colonels' Coup of April 1967.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22ND, 1963, DALLAS, TEXAS, 12.30PM.The US President, John F Kennedy, is assassinated as his motorcade hits town, watched by crowds of spectators and the world s media. Watching too from the grassy knoll nearby is a young mother who, in the confusion, lets go of her daughter's hand. When she turns around the little girl has vanished. Fifty years later, when everyone remembers what they were doing at that moment in history, she is still missing. Who will remember her?Local hack Gary Blanchet, inspired by the mother's story, joins forces with former police psychic Lydia Collins to seek answers. Risking ridicule for their controversial theories and with a classroom shooting close to home to deal with, they re-examine the evidence from that day, study footage and look at the official report for details of witnesses in the JFK case. But this time they re not looking for a man in a crowd with a gun; they are looking for little Eleanor Boone.Gone, while no one was watching? Maybe someone was.

The Water-castle is a journal of love, romance and discord in 1950s Germany as a Welsh artist and poet, Elizabeth Greatorex, travels with her French husband to meet her former lover Klaus, a German count.

William Henry Davies was born in a pub and learnt early in life to rely on his wits and his fists and to drink. Around the turn of the century, when he was twenty-two, his restless spirit of adventure led him to set off for America, and he worked around the country taking casual jobs where he could, thieving and begging where he couldn't. His experiences were richly coloured by the bullies, tricksters, and fellow-adventurers he encountered New Haven Baldy, Wee Shorty, The Indian Kid, and English Harry, to name but a few. He was thrown into prison in Michigan, beaten up in New Orleans, witnessed a lynching in Tennessee, and got drunk pretty well everywhere. A harrowing accident forced him to return to England and the seedy world of doss-houses and down-and-outs like Boozy Bob and Irish Tim.When George Bernard Shaw first read the Autobiography in manuscript, he was stunned by the raw power of its unvarnished narrative. It was his enthusiasm, expressed in the Preface, that ensured the initial success of a book now regarded as a classic.

Snowdonia, 1880, and Jane Gruffydd is a newcomer to the district, dressed to the nines and almost fainting in the heat of the interminable prayer meeting out on the mountainside...In the pages of this classic 1936 novel, we see the passionate and headstrong Jane grow up and grow old, struggling to bring up a family of six children on the pittance earned by her slate-quarrying husband, Ifan. Spanning the next forty years, the novel traces the contours not only of one vividly evoked Welsh family but of a nation coming to self-consciousness; it begins in the heyday of Methodist fervour and ends in the carnage and disillusionment of the First World War.Through it all, Jane survives, the centre of her world and the inspiration for her children who will grow up determined to change the conditions of these poor people's lives, to release them forever from their chains.

Meet the prostitute who gets the better of her brothers when they try to marry her off, the wife who is absolved of adultery, the hero who drowns in a bowser of cheap beer, the poetry slammer who doesn't get to perform his final poem, and many more.

Migrants, immigrants, travellers, and holidaymakers feature in Dylan Thomas Prize-winner Rachel Trezise's second collection of short fiction: in eleven dazzling stories of lives lived on either side of boundaries, and on the fringes of society.

Between Two Rivers is an honest, funny and moving memoir of Baghdad life from the perspective of a young woman from England, transplanted into another culture by love and family. Dorothy is eighteen when she meets a dark, mysterious stranger at a dance in Portsmouth. Zane is a student from Iraq studying engineering. Almost before she realises, they are married, her husband has finished his course and Dorothy has a three month old daughter called Summer. They borrow a Mercedes from Zane's brother in Germany and begin the drive to Baghdad. Zane doesn't have a licence or insurance for the car and Dorothy doesn't have a visa for Iraq. Zane has only just told his family he is married. They arrive in Baghdad to live with his parents, sisters and brothers in a house in the suburbs. Zane has to find a job in a country where everything is changing. Dorothy has to learn Arabic and help entertain a stream of visitors, all eager to meet the imported new bride. She is soon pregnant again. Life in in the east is not going to be as she expected, letters take weeks to arrive from home and her mother is convinced she is never going to see her daughter again... The book follows twenty years of love, adjustment and adventure for Dorothy Al Khafaji.

These poems of desire, loss and revenge explore lives caught in the gravity of their own orbit. Haunting, distinctive and sensual, debut poetry collection The Shape of a Forest has unblinking scope. This sophisticated debut collection moves from the historical to the contemporary: Genghis Kahn surveys his territory whilst Amelia Earhart disappears to myth. The Belvedere Apollo is dug up heralding the onset of The Renaissance as a tiger meets a foe in a Siberian Forest, the Pendle witches are hung in Lancashire, and in tsunami-struck Japanese gardens, South Sea islands and New York hotel rooms, lives are loosened like milk teeth. The Shape of a Forest is a powerful survey of life and of human experience that spans centuries and the continents.

As the newly-built foundries of South Wales enter their first decline, a travelling harpist from the rural north arrives in town to find his friends caught in a fiercly-fought industrial dispute, a dispute which quickly spirals out of control.

Dannie Abse's rich mixture of Welsh and Jewish backgrounds, and his dual occupations of doctor and author, have led to what is widely regarded as one of the most readable, humorous and poignant autobiographies since the war.

Imagine a life of adventure, set in the world of second-hand books: finding a valuable first edition gathering dust on a Parisian pub shelf, opening bookshops in Montpellier, Paris, Bangor, trading books with a holidaying Ian McEwan or Alan Sillitoe, and running for the door after finding yourself trespassing in a wealthy Moroccan's private library...The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner recounts the trials, joys and tribulations of selling second hand books. Full of quirky anecdotes and literary odds and ends, these unique insider's tales of the trade are sure to spark the imagination of every book- lover who picks it up.

A classic selection of the best of Stan Barstow's stories covering the last five decades of British life. A group of young tearaways on a night out that begins with horse-play and ends in tragedy; the loneliness of a drunken miner's wife; a war-shocked ex-sailor forced beyond endurance, a widower is brought to grief by a woman outside his real understanding, a factory worker finding his way through the physical world of his marriage real and involving, Barstow's stories are urgent slices of life, men and women struggling and succeeding to come to terms with The Likes of Us.