Skin is a taxi driver, Bones is a Detective Inspector. They hate each other but both operate on the same patch, the large ex-industrial town of Elchurch on the South Coast of Wales. A young woman is found dead and they are both drawn into the investigation. But all is not what it seems as the brothers separately and together deal with the consequences of the murder.
Feels like we’re just waking up here after a long time of little activity – in the foreground at least.
We may go back to sleep after this or it may spark something off that leads to a huge increase in activity – i.e. sales of books.
Anyway, we are publishing a new novel by Derec Jones at the end of this month (May 2019)
In the meantime, here’s a picture of the cover and a little information that we hope will help to sell it.
The Shattering sequel to Opera. Kiára Árgenta’s latest novel is an intimate portrayal of the life and loves of Opera Divas on and off the stage.
Beneath the beauty and glamour of the Opera stars and the richly coloured world they inhabit, lies a morass of insecurity and jealousy, passion and anguish.
A disturbing yet moving book that is written in Kiára’s unique style. Not to be missed.
** Highly recommended read
“A Fantastic Adventure”
In the bluestone caverns, deep under Masterbridge, someone was taking notice. It had been a long time since there was anything to notice, anything at all, but there was, imperceptibly, something there.
The yellow ridged fingernail reached out to swirl the inky, black water. With a sprinkle of chosen herbs the scene burst into life once again. The shrouded face watched intently as the picture cleared, expanded, shuddered and then settled down to admit the truth…..yes, she was coming.
Coven of One is the story of a simple Hedgewitch’s journey into the furthest recesses of the darkest heart of the darkest demon. A story of spells and potions, imbued with Pagan magic.
Reviews and Quotes
“Dorcas Fleming has completed her training and is ready for a future as a simple hedgewitch. But as soon as she hears of her placement in the heathen south, it is clear Dorcas’s destiny is to run on a deeper plane.
As we travel with her on her momentous journey, through a vividly drawn and dramatic landscape, accompanied by a mischievous and wise talking cat and a colourful cast, we too are drawn into a magical world of spells, potions and enchantment. Rooted in the author’s pagan beliefs, this is a truly magical book.
Read it. I can promise you a bewitching experience that will stay with you long after you turn the final page. ”
— Debi Alper, author of Nirvana Bites.
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please contact us if you want to order a book from outside the UK with your delivery details and we will advise you of the cost.
Coven of one is also available online as a paperback and for the Kindle. Click here for more info
‘I could be one of those divas on stage, reaching out for the chandelier with their powerful voices in their elegant world.’
‘At that time, Opera seemed like a glamorous world, a place of opulence and beauty and bouquets of roses for the leading singers. I never knew that once inside the glass bubble staring out at the blackness of the auditorium how ugly it was, how we lived in a world built on nepotism and lies and sore throats and endless fighting over roles. I never knew how much it would take from me, how much pressure I would be under. I saw myself as a diva, a star who would adore the attention, but it came at such a cost, more agony than I ever thought possible. I sacrificed every relationship, every friendship I ever had on the altar of my ambition.’
Inside the cut-throat world of Opera, young mezzo-soprano Natalija is beautiful, talented and arrogant and will stop at nothing to get to the top of her career. She lives and breathes the role of Carmen, casting aside everyone who cares about her. Underneath her public persona lies a troubled and damaged girl who is killing herself and her career with bulimia and overwork. She believes she is ruthless and nothing and no one will stop her reaching the absolute top but in the end she realises her rivals can be even more deadly.
This is the latest novel from Kiára Árgenta and offers the unique opportunity to see what really goes on behind the scenes at the Opera. The author has created a story that is operatic in its own right and chimes with the beauty and the tragedy that defines the sublime art-form both on and off the stage.
Now available worldwide in paperback or as an ebook for the kindle:
Amazon.co.uk: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1904958656/
Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1904958656/
Bums is the fourth novel from Welsh writer Derec Jones, and the first to feature Detective Inspector Frank Lee.
During his investigation into the killing of the headmaster of the biggest school in the county, the DI comes across the motley collection of ‘Bums’ that inhabit the nether lands on the edges of society.
After a traumatic life as a Traveller who often came to blows with the authorities, Frank is now operating within the ‘system’. Despite all the pressures to conform and obey without question, he insists on doing things his way – laid back and Zen.
Look out for the next two books in this trilogy of stories featuring the unlikely policeman: Beats and Bones – coming soon!
BUMS is now available as a special hard-cover edition, limited to a maximum of 200 signed copies at £20 each plus delivery.
Now available in paperback and for the kindle
Scroll down to read the first chapter.
Enter your name and email address in the form below, and let us know where in the world you would like your limited edition book delivered. We’ll then send you an invoice by email which you can pay using a credit/debit card or Paypal. Leave any comments in the box.
** Click here to read the first review of Bums on Wales Arts Review
Tuesday night.
A naked body, wrapped loosely in plastic bin liners, is dragged along a dark back lane. A man’s arm, bare, apart from an expensive gold wristwatch, flops out. A gloved hand snatches the watch from the wrist and lets the arm fall. The body is dumped on a pile of black bags already bursting with rotting rubbish. Continue reading “BUMS”
by Derec Jones
This is a courageous novel – a story told through seemingly random glimpses into the mind of the unnamed narrator as he tries to decipher his life.
It’s about memories, about aspirations, about failure, and ultimately it’s about truth.
It’s a book of death and nightmares, of love and light, and the eternal search to find meaning in the chaos of existence.
In the end it all has to make sense. Doesn’t it?
But where did it all begin?
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The Three Bears is also available in many ebook formats at Smashwords
Also available for the Kindle (UK) and Kindle (US)
I feel like I’ve just gotten off a roller coaster.
Everything works. This is outstanding!
Unique in voice, courageous in execution.
Literary fiction can often be dense and off-putting, but this is both brisk and involving . . .
Awesome stuff.
more comments after the excerpt
Preface
Before you think I’m going to continue rambling in this irrelevant way, don’t worry, I’m not, and anyway these rambles are not irrelevant, otherwise they wouldn’t be here, would they? I’m just trying to tell you that the last two or three years of my life have been hard – very hard. I’m only just beginning to realise what stress I’ve been under. And before you think this is just a diatribe from a moaning old git, I have to tell you that there are other people involved, people I love who have suffered more than I have.
But that’s all by the by. This is a story after all, and you are a reader and there are certain expectations, certain rules that have to be obeyed if our relationship is going to have any sort of validity. I’m telling you a story so I have to obey the rules of story-telling, otherwise you’ll get bored or frustrated or just plain pissed-off and I know how bad that can be, so I’m with you there.
So, this story has to have a beginning, middle and end. Fine, I can go along with that, especially now the beginning’s done, well, it’s begun anyway. The middle? Not too difficult – just throw up a few obstacles, write around them or through them or over them and, and well it sounds easy doesn’t it? It probably is easy, relatively easy; when compared to what I’ve been through over the past two or three years.
Normally I’m a man who can handle everything; it’s a curious mixture of Eastern mysticism and Western machismo. Come on you bastards, throw it at me. I can take it. I can take the deadliest disease in your power and absorb its evil energy. I can use my intelligence and charm to avoid the maddest madman. I can sit and smile with equanimity while discussing the utter meaninglessness of existence and the complete irrelevance of the whole of human history in the scheme of things, while blissfully tuning into the absolute oneness of so-called love that is so-called God. But these last two or three years have been a mare, a fucking nightmare.
OK, enough digression for now. I’d better get the beginning of the story started before you piss off and re-read Jane Eyre or something else, equally mind-numbingly mainstream. Mainstream, mainstream, bollocks.
c h a p t e r o n e
It’s over. Her face sinks slowly into the black pool. It’s the end.
But where did it all begin?
I look at her and wonder what it is that has kept us together all this time. I wonder whether she thinks the same way.
“Is everything all right?” I ask.
“How do you mean?”
“You know, we haven’t had much chance to talk lately, what with your work taking it out of you, and most nights you’re too tired to talk and the television is on all the bloody time, and on the weekends I’m pretty useless.”
“Well, I’m here now, I’m talking now. What do you want to say?”
“I thought you said you wanted to talk to me?”
“OK then, tell me about Annie.”
“Annie’s dead,” I say.
“Yeah, but what about when she was alive? You haven’t been the same since she died. Was there more to your relationship?”
“What?”
“You and Annie, was there more to it?” There is a distant chill in her voice
“Well no, not really, not at all.” I feel myself flushing red. I look at her and I think: Who is this woman?
She looks determined; as passive as a statue, yet as unchallengeable as an angry gorilla. I stand up, it’s a natural reaction to threat I suppose, I’m bigger than her, taller and fatter and heavier and I’m a man for fuck’s sake.
“Sit.” She says.
I sit.
“It’s obvious there was something going on – obvious.”
“She was just a friend, just another fucked-up human being who I met along the way, someone to share a coffee with now and again, that’s all.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I never did anything, we were just friends.”
“You’ve always been the same, looking for someone else; I’ve never been enough for you.”
“What’s going on? Are you all right?”
“Never been better. All these years I’ve looked after us; looked after you, and now I realise you’re not worth it. You’ve never been worth it. I’ve given up my life for you. The things I’ve done for you, don’t you see? Can’t you see?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s too late anyway. Too late.”
Or did it begin here?
Cardiff, 1971. Somewhere in Canton, a side street off Cathedral Road. I’m not sure who’s living with me, not sure if I pay the rent. There’s something about Hendrix’s death, or an anniversary of Hendrix’s death. It could be 1970; I’ll have to work it out one day.
I’m 18, sharing a house with a few others. There’s one or two Cardiff boys and one or two Llanelli boys. Perhaps I’m crashing on the floor in Mike’s room.
Been here for a while, a few weeks at least, because I know I’m claiming the dole, ambling down to somewhere near Westgate Street once a week or whatever frequency it is now, popping into the chemist on the way back for cough medicine, or nicking a pint of milk off a doorstep.
Living on chips and cornflakes; chips, cornflakes, cough medicine and stolen milk.
# # #
This is brilliant.
Excellent book.
wonderful writing
Anyone who fails to appreciate the quality of this is either not paying attention, or just plain dense. It’s the kind of writing I can read to music and shut out the outside world. The rhythm, the dialogue, the little segues into second person, just great.
It’s bloody brilliant.
Oh my God, ‘proper’ literature that breaks rules and creates new ways of doing things and pulses off the page – I need to lie down now.
Seriously good stuff.
A superb piece of writing, a joy to read.
a unique voice-one of the most original, full fat, piece of writing I’v read in a long while. Great, great stuff
this is the most unique voice I’ve possibly ever read.
fast-paced and wonderful, but at the same time confusing and scary. It’s great.
What a fantastic and compelling story
Gritty, realistic and darkly humourous
It’s really really good stuff
sucks the reader in from the first sentence
There is something mesmerizing about this
I love this, and I hate it. I hate it, because it’s making me aware, more than most, of my mortality and of how crap life can be. I love it, because the narrative is raw, the writing raw, right into the nerves.
one of the most unusual things I have ever read
Everything fits. I haven’t read such a clever book in a long time and I love it. There is madness, lots of it, lots of pieces that shouldn’t add up – but they do. And when they do, they make sense – perfect sense.
‘Wood shavings spilling out like a soldier’s guts’? A flawless line! This is a bold book, no doubt there, and all the stronger for it. The descriptions are tight but perfectly worded to put you in the narrator’s head.
this is just amazing
Fast paced, clever, witty
this just blows me away
I was going to say how much I enjoyed it, but ‘enjoyed’ is a mild word for experiencing a human mind taking itself on with bare knuckles.
a really refreshing piece of writing
this is a wonderful book
This is fantastic.
what it is is a work of art, in the fullest sense
Everyone’s a cheat or a liar, or both. What happens when the Greatest Living Artist in Wales decides to stop playing the game?
Brian Llewelyn is an artist at the peak of his powers, in fact he’s the Greatest Living Artist in Wales. Despite his success, or perhaps because of it, his life seems worthless. He decides to redeem himself by investing heavily in a community arts project.
Following this altruistic path exposes the fragile foundations his success is built on. His life disintegrates and his career evaporates as the corrupt liars and cheats propping him up turn on him.
Cheats and Liars is an exploration of success and its fallout set deep in the psyche of Brian Llewelyn, The Greatest Living Artist in Wales.
Published as a paperback and for the Kindle at all the usual places
by Derec Jones
The stunning debut novel from Kiára Árgenta
*** Now available – Amazon UK, Amazon US
“You will end up killing each other. It will be disastrous. Stop this relationship now with this volatile man and find someone who is normal and nice, Kiára. Find a stable rock of a man who is not a volcano. Listen to my advice, for God’s sake.”
I should follow this advice as the shrink knows what he is talking about. But damn the rock. I rip up the guidebook and the map and plunge into the forest of thorns for pleasure and pain. Obsessive love and hate know no limits and the spikes of their extremes propel me into eternity.
I want to flat-line but I can’t. Not now I have met István, the first king of Hungary.
I want to stop the bright colours and sharp edges that make us Kiára and István. I want to trade in the swirling dizzy vortex of Italian Futurist art for the softness of a Monet. Just for one day I want to live without this bipolar illness which has dragged me into the Heaven and Hell which is my Hungary.
Maybe you waited a thousand years for me as you said, István. Maybe it is all a myth. I only know there is no end for us, no rest and no escape.
There is only infinity.
‘She is a true ice princess. Beautiful and delicate, but her heart doesn’t seem to be warm. I have visions that it is not even beating, that I have imagined she is real and she is just a figment of my distressed imagination. It is the first unravelling I have experienced. Sure, I fell apart after Kiára’s death and I existed in a mist until I met Lilla but this is a splintering feeling. As though I am cracking like a mirror and shards of my personality are starting to fall to the ground.’
Two years after the death of the love of his life, István cannot move on. He is ill with bipolar disorder and is convinced the answer is to find the image of his dead love in someone else. He meets Lilla on a Budapest street; young, fragile and impressionable and he is desperate to possess her. However, Lilla has her own darkness and over time, István’s jealousy, his anger, and his violent obsession turn her into someone who carelessly smashes his heart into fragments.
