Our authors
Alan Bilton
Alan Bilton is the author of three novels, The End of the Yellow House, The Sleepwalkers’ Ball and The Known and Unknown Sea, as well as a collection of short stories, Anywhere Out of the World. He has also written books on silent film, contemporary fiction, and the 1920s. At Dawn, Two Nightingales is his fourth novel.
Carole Hailey
After years of failing to write in the middle of the night, Carole Hailey abandoned a lucrative career as a lawyer to become an impoverished novelist. She subsequently accumulated an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths and a PhD from Swansea University. Carole was shortlisted for the International Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award 2020 and is a London Library Emerging Writer 2020/21. The Book of Jem is her first novel.
Carolyn Lewis
Born in Cardiff in 1947, Carolyn’s work has appeared in Mslexia, Honno and Route Magazine amongst others. Her first novel, Missing Nancy, was published in 2008. Most of the stories in this collection have either won a prize or have been published. With an MPhil in Writing from the University of South Wales, Carolyn is currently taking a PhD at Swansea University where she is writing a new novel. She has worked as a creative writing tutor for many years and two text books have been published based on her teaching methods.
Edward Matthews
Edward Matthews is a writer and educator based in San Diego, California. He earned his Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Swansea University in 2020. He has read and published widely on the topic of reimagining space along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, focusing on San Diego and Tijuana. Border Memories is his first novel.
At Dawn, Two Nightingales
Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century. At Dawn, Two Nightingales is rumoured to be the most dangerous poem in the world, its haunted verses said to be invested with mysterious, supernatural powers. Now a ragbag bunch of bandits, criminals, censors and brigands are all hunting for it in an uproarious adventure that is part quest, part comic opera, and part unexpected ghost story.
Alan Bilton – The End of the Yellow House
Central Russia, 1919, a sanatorium cut off by the chaos of the Russian civil war. The murder of the chief doctor sets in motion a nightmarish series of events involving mysterious experiments, the secret police, the Tsar’s double, an enigmatic ‘visitor’, giant corpses, possessed cats, sorcery, and the overwhelming madness of war, in this fantastical and wildly exuberant historical novel.
Carole Hailey – The Book of Jem
In the aftermath of catastrophic religious wars, God has been banned. A young woman – Jem – arrives in the isolated village of Underhill, announcing that not only does God exist, but It has sent her to deliver an apocalyptic message. Villagers convinced that Jem is lying, watch in horror as family and friends flock to join the God’s Threads religion. As the prophesied apocalypse draws near, Jem’s divisive message eventually threatens the very existence of Underhill.
Carolyn Lewis – Some Sort of Twilight
These twelve stories are of people unsure of their place in the world – Cassie who discovers she can fly and has no-one to tell, Christine who’s been in her friend’s shadow for a long time, Bernard who loses his job through no fault of his own and Hannah who knows her father is waiting for her to sort his life out.
These stories combine pathos, humour and wisdom to explore how the ordinary can be strange, heartbreaking or comic, illuminating the inner lives of people who feel in some way they’re on the edge of their own lives.
Edward Matthews – Border Memories
Why live one life, when you could live a thousand?
Sol works for a start-up that traffics in the underground memory trade—harvesting memories from donors in Mexico and implanting them in Americans.
Sol’s newest client is Mr. Bray—old, rich, well-connected, blind. Mr. Bray hears rumors of a graveyard where miracles occur and has tracked down a young librarian, Nora, who remembers it.
Sol’s task is simple—find Nora, extract her memory.
But when Sol befriends Nora, he begins to understand who Mr. Bray is and what he is capable of doing…