Richard Collins has been a farm labourer, gardener and estate worker. He lives with his family in west Wales and teaches at the Institute of Rural Studies in Llanbadarn. His first novel, the love story The Land as Viewed from the Sea, received much critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Whitbread and Welsh Book of the Year prizes in 2005.

Daniel is travelling across Europe, away from school and family. He’s not sure what he is searching for but he enjoys not knowing where he will be tomorrow. He meets Oliver, older, mysterious, physically impressive, but a confused family man searching for his wife and children. Oliver persuades Daniel to drive for him and so their adventures begin in a story that twists and turns like the mountain roads they drive along.

Moments of suspense and danger on the road are followed by episodes of relaxation and love in this sensitive and very contemporary re-telling of the odyssey story. During a spell in a religious commune, Daniel, attracted to the pious but provocative Emma, puts himself through a terrifying physical test written in Collins’ brilliant, precise and evocative style. The natural world they travel in is brought vividly to life in wonderful descriptive passages, especially in the delightful countryside meetings with Caroline, the intelligent and attractive, ex-girl friend of Oliver, who employs both men to work for her on the land and whose relationships with them hugely affect their lives.

In beautiful prose, so admired in The Land as Viewed from the Sea, Richard Collins delicately explores two stories of love; Daniel looking for his first love and Oliver looking to re-affirm his love for his wife.

Overland
Things happen to Dan. He's nineteen, and travelling aimlessly when a woman hands him a note. He's not supposed to read it, only pass it to her husband Oliver, who's been unfaithful to her once too often: "This is like some kind of test. Just get yourself home and come in...a different man." Dan finds himself chauffeuring Oliver, on a chase through a generic Europe after his wife and children, nearly finding them, losing them, losing each other; losing their passports; losing their transport; nearly losing a life, as well as their sanity. During their journey they find friendship, and learn to recognise love. Where Dan offers Oliver an opportunity to save his marriage, the older man also frees Dan of his guilt at having rejected at nine his disabled father ten years before. But, as in Wordsworth's repeated refrain, "The child is the father of the man." It is a nice twist that Collins chooses a punk setting, that era of spitting youth nihilism and parent-teen apartheid. Overland is a homage to youth and the here and now which Dan inhabits.
Enthusiastic, spontaneous, hopeful of rescue even in the most desperate situations, Dan is unashamedly a hero, naked and literally garlanded towards the end. The touches of allegory in this picaresque novel make it an oddball Odyssey, happy like Dan to meander, "but that's OK," as he would have it, except when a touch of blackmail and amnesia steers matters to a satisfying close. The naivety of a young protagonist presented in the first person, present narrative is a great source of irony, and whether or not one subscribes to Overland's philosophy conjoining punk with flower power, its dry, understated humour is a joy to read.
Cyfnewidfa Lên Cymru/Wales Literature Exchange