Author(s): Richard King

History | Wales

Brittle with Relics is a landmark history of the people of Wales during a period of great national change.

'Richly humane, viscerally political, generously multi-voiced, Brittle with Relics is oral history at its revelatory best: containing multitudes and powerfully evoking that most remote but also resonant of times, the day before yesterday.'
DAVID KYNASTON

There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics.
- 'A Welsh Landscape', R. S. Thomas

In the closing third of the twentieth century, Wales experienced the simultaneous effects of deindustrialisation, the subsequent loss of employment and community cohesion, and the struggle for its language and identity. These changes were largely forced upon the country, whose own voice, rarely agreed upon within its borders, had to fight to be heard outside of Wales.

Brittle with Relics is a history of the people of Wales undergoing some of the country's most seismic and traumatic events: the disasters of Aberfan and Tryweryn; the rise of the Welsh language movement; the Miners' Strike and its aftermath; and the narrow vote in favour of partial devolution.

Featuring the voices of Neil Kinnock, Rowan Williams, Leanne Wood, Gruff Rhys, Michael Sheen, Nicky Wire, Sian James, Welsh language activists, members of former mining communities and many more, this is a vital history of a nation determined to survive, while maintaining the hope that Wales will one day thrive on its own terms.

'A testament to the brutal circumstances that bonded the communities of Wales into a new polity for the 21st century.'
GRUFF RHYS

'This book is a guide to remembering who we can be when we work together.'
GWENNO SAUNDERS

'An essential telling of Welshness that contains a powerful reflection of Englishness, too.'
EMMA WARREN

Author Biography: RICHARD KING is the author of Original Rockers (shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and a Rough Trade, The Times and Uncut Book of the Year), How Soon Is Now? (the Sunday Times Music Book of the Year) and The Lark Ascending (a Rough Trade, Mojo and Evening Standard Book of the Year, shortlisted for the Penderyn Prize), all published by Faber & Faber. He was born into a bilingual family in South Wales and for the last twenty years has lived in the rural county of Powys, Mid Wales.