Lloyd Jones

Reprint of the original, first published in 1867.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1867.

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Part autobiography, part memoir, part quest, lauded writer Lloyd Jones’s The Beaded Curtain is a trenchant exploration of the artist as witness. The text gets about from Jones’s Lower Hutt childhood and youthful wanderings across the USA to formative experiences such as seeing clothes from Hiroshima and his encounters with the Jewish Memorial in Berlin. From the hills of the Wairarapa to Hiroshima and Waiheke Island, he looks at examples of mavericks, in his own family and in those of poets and conscientious objectors. He is, throughout, daringly innovative, the text folding one event inside another. With language so precise and at times so coruscating that it may have been cut from stone, and with a candour and humanity that draws the reader deep into Jones’s preoccupations and memories, The Beaded Curtain challenges, rails and mourns as he grapples with the past. Elegant and searing, tender and angry, it holds the reader in its steady, accomplished, clear-eyed grip.

The wild secrets of boyhood is where Lloyd Jones sets off in his first book of poetry; intoxicated with images, and invoking dream spaces where language is forever in play. Lloyd Jones was seven years old the first time he climbed high into a grandstand to watch rugby with his father. The experience was baptismal. From his new elevated perspective Jones believed he could see everything that mattered - a field of play that rolled out, green with promise, from suburban New Zealand to the wider world. The grandstand is a guiding metaphor for these questing narrative poems that reach back into childhood and forward into the life of a writer constantly experimenting with form and voice. Jones writes of the wild secrets of boyhood - riding dogs, falling from trees, destroying the class ukuleles, learning to sail in small boats. He is alert to the airless small-town grievances that must inevitably be escaped. As an aspiring young writer Jones travelled widely, testing his identity against difference - places, people, politics and importantly, language. The more recent poems are a re-assembling of coordinates and a return to the local view. The grandstand has long been decommissioned - it's a housing estate now, but the poems are full of air and greenery. Dream spaces where language is forever in play.

First published in 1890, "The Life, Times & Labours of Robert Owen" is a two-volume biography of Robert Owen by Irish socialist and activist Lloyd Jones. Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a Welsh textile manufacturer, philanthropist, and social reformer. Owen founded utopian socialism and the cooperative movement, but is perhaps best known for his endeavours to improve factory working conditions. This detailed biography covers his life from youth until his last days, with a particular focus on his contributions to social reform. Contents include: "Birth and Boyhood", "Starts as his Own Master", "The Dying of the Old", "The Birth of the New", "Struggles Onward", "Visit to Scotland", "Purchase of the New Lanark Mills", "His Policy at New Lanark", "Mr Dale's Confidence in Him", "The Fight and its Difficulties", etc. Other notable works by this author include: "A Reply to Mr. R. Carlile's Objections to the Five Fundamental Facts as Laid Down by Mr. Owen" (1837) and "The Progress of the Working Class, 1832-1867" (1867). Read & Co. History is republishing this classic biography now in a new facsimile edition complete with an introductory chapter by Leslie Stephen from "Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 42".

The next morning Alma showed up with his tin case of pencils and his sketchbooks. She showed him through to the sitting room. She had an idea that a sitting was a formal occasion and in preparation had gone around the room straightening cushions and pulling off furnishing covers. She had dressed herself up in her Sunday best, a black skirt and red blouse. She had been toying with putting a flower in her hair. Long ago, when the men were away at the war, Alma began painting the women of the town. Alice, his favourite, returned his attentions, and when her husband George came home from the war, he set out to prove his love and reclaim his wife by moving a hill to improve the view for her - with a spade and wheelbarrow. Now, decades later, the townspeople, looking to escape various corners of despair, turn to Alma's drawing classes and, in doing so, learn to rediscover each other. For when you draw, the only thing that matters is what lies before you. Paint Your Wife is a colourful, sensual novel, brimming with rich stories and even richer characters.

A History of Silence is a touching memoir about a country and a landscape. It's about the devastation in Christchurch after the 2011 earthquake and the faultlines that this event opened up in Lloyd Jones' understanding of his own family. It's about how easily we erase from our history, the stories that we find inconvenient. In his typically lyrical and engaging prose, Jones embarks on a journey of discovery. On this journey he finds out more about his country and the landscape that surrounds him, but he also uncovers the truth about his family. This truth is completely unexpected and changes everything. This deeply moving book is about loss and survival and silence.

Based on the Third Branch of the Mabinogion, See How They Run tells the story of Llwyd Evans, a small-minded, malicious academic tasked with researching one of Wales' biggest heroes, the rugby player Big M. Self-satisfied. Llwyd's work takes him to Dublin and Dun Laoghaire, then to Holyhead and the luxurious but bizarre Hotel Corvo on the west Wales coast, as he begins to unravel a mystery that links rugby and the gods of Celtic myth, and a tattoo of a mouse with a string of tragic deaths that may not have been accidents after all." Lloyd Jones' novella has the epic scope of the novels of Umberto Eco... the quirkiness and attention to detail of John Irving." New Welsh ReviewLloyd Jones lives in Llanfairfechan, north Wales. Mr Vogel (Seren, 2004) won the McKitterick Prize, and Mr Cassini (Seren, 2006) won the Wales Book of the Year in 2007. His short-story collection is My First Colouring Book (Seren, 2008).

A boy watches his mother hooked and reeled ashore by a fisherman. A couple give up their seats on a bus for lovers soon to be parted. A husband enters a world imagined by his wife and pretends to be the man she loves. The Man in the Shed is a haunting collection of stories about family, love and longing. These extraordinary tales take conventional life and tilt it sideways, delivering a memorable blend of the real and the surreal.

Sometimes a person passes through your world and you don't forget them. She is like that. She is crossing continents, searching for her missing child. Everyone she comes into contact with has a tale to tell: the truck driver who mistook her for a prostitute, the hunters who almost shot her, the Frenchman who loved her, the blind man and the lodger. This is her story.