Niall Griffiths

On leaving school, a 16 year-old boy goes to live with his uncle on a remote Welsh hill-farm. His aunt recently committed suicide after losing her livestock in the foot-and-mouth epidemic and his uncle has turned, once again, to the bottle. The boy is an innocent, a spiritual savant; his uncle sees him as a shaman. An unwitting repository of folk memory, he is a boy from the margins: barely educated but possessed of extraordinary insights; barely literate but able to speak a language of his own - a poetry laden with Pagan and Christian myth. He is unaware that he is gifted, unaware of what he knows in general - which is probably for the best since the enormity of his knowledge, were it to be understood, would crush him...

Written with a raging, lyrical fury, this is a devastating satire on a society fixated on image and celebrity - how innocence and individuality are routinely sacrificed for the totems of sex and wealth and glamour: a magnificent howl of anger and despair at a culture disintegrating into a brittle cult of fame.

1 volume ; 20 cm

Chased by a hit-man, a young man returns home from London to a small town in Wales. Reconciliation with his family is alternated with his pursuer’s progress. A long criminal connection is revealed but can he escape the sins of his fathers? This is a tense, tightly written drama that will captivate the reader with fast, gut-wrenching action.

In 1976, Niall's family emigrated to Australia, as part of the GBP10 Pom scheme. He lived there for 3 years, moving from Brisbane to Perth in a souped-up station wagon. 30 years later, he returned to retrace his steps. This is his memoir.

"This is the story of Ianto: the feral, inarticulate, inbred, ignoble savage; haunter of mountains, killer of innocents. Ianto is a sheepshagger - a yokel, a Welsh redneck. But Ianto is also a seer, a visionary - the genius loci - who comprehends nature with a Blakean intensity, and is at one with the world he lives in: the moss and lichen, the lamb and the raven, the summit and the scree.". "Robbed of his ancestral home - a near-derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales - Ianto pledges revenge not only on the English yuppies who have turned his grandmother's cottage into a weekenders' barbecue party but on all those who have violated him and the land that is his. The oppression and abuse that Ianto has faced ignites his lurid imagination into unspeakable savagery."--BOOK JACKET.