Chris Keil is an accomplished linguist and he ran an upland sheep farm for nigh-on twenty years. He has worked as a Brixton schoolteacher and a teacher of English as a foreign language in a number of European countries. He has specialised, vocationally, in marketing Welsh lamb in Europe, and academically, in collective memory and representations of the Holocaust. He lectures worldwide and has published on dissonant heritage and traumatic memory at Auschwitz. He lives in Carmarthenshire, west Wales, and currently lectures at Trinity College, Carmarthen, as well as acting as a tour guide in major European cities. This is his second novel.

Aled is used to his dad Geraint waxing lyrical about some saint's clifftop lookout; some Greek temple or another hosting a thousand sacred prostitutes; some village near Corinth. Geraint is the county archaeologist, after all. So when travel agent Aled takes a recce trip to that same Peloponnese village, his father is surprised. When Aled fails to return on the eve of his marriage, Geraint becomes alarmed and sets out on his trail.

Relationships – father and youthful son; son and elderly mother; fiancés, lovers; colleagues - none are immutable. This novel shows those thresholds of choice, those liminal moments and places where a door may open onto another world, or at the very least, another way of relating to the one we have.

Praise for Chris Keil
"Quietly powerful... reaching to the roots of our daily life."
TLS

"Infused with a lyrical voice and the vocabulary of the poet."
New Welsh Review

Reviews
"Evocative... Chris Keil's writing, which is limpid and often arrestingly vivid, has a charged quality that conveys the mysteries pulsing behind the everyday surfaces of things."
The Guardian

"Hypnotic"
Jan Morris

"A subtle and intricate meditation on the blurry junctures separating us from the past, from each other, and finally from ourselves."
Tristan Hughes

"After eleven chapters I'm enthralled by Liminal - the spare, precise, resonant language, the deftess with which character and mutual response are bodied forth, the sense of human and mythic hinterland minimally and disturbingly evoked, the sheer metaphysical ambition of the novel - as soon as I've finished writing this, I'll be continuing to read."
Jim Perrin

"Liminal’s central enigma is rewarding & human."
John M Harrison, uzwi.wordpress.com

"This is a literary novel in the modern style. Chris Keil weaves a celtic knot between Wales & Greece, between the past & the present & between what is above & below the surface of our consciousness. The tempo of the work develops the urgency of a crime novel & I read large tracts of the book in single sittings. Mysteries develop and are resolved, wholly or partially, against richly evoked backdrops. A cast of eccentric characters explore themes of philosophy & spirituality. Keil is developing an idiosyncratic style following his exciting first novel "The French Thing" & I look forward to the next one with interest."
www.amazon.com

"A real sense of mystery is woven around the circumstances of [Aled's] disappearance and the novel takes on the aspect of a detective story... The evocations of the Greek landscape and historical sites are beautifully wrought... a subtle and haunting novel... simultaneously reflective and entertaining; philosophical and dryly humorous."
Ceri Shaw, americymru.ning

Liminal
Pilgrimage and life-changing experiences form central themes in Chris Keil's second novel. Geraint is an archaeologist and museum curator from west Wales, divorced, teetering on the edge of a relationship with a young Greek widow, and concerned about his elderly mother. He becomes fascinated with the local connections of the mysterious Celtic saint Brygga and absorbs himself in research into her travels, which took her to Armorica, then to Greece. His travel-agent son, Aled, grasping the chance to combine a business trip with helping his father reconstruct Brygga's itinerary, leaves for Greece, a matter of weeks before his planned wedding to the blond Valkyrie, Angela. When Aled does not return, Geraint, his ex-wife Elaine, and Angela go in search of him. Geraint finds himself following in Brygga's footsteps as he tries to retrace Aled's movements before his disappearance. In his absence, his colleague Janice makes progress with her novel, keeping curious pace with Geraint's unfolding story, at once mirroring and foretelling his progress. At the same time she continues digging into the mystery of a local woman who disappeared long ago and whose history seems to have been efffaced.
Separation, liminality and return: the same patterns condition each life, but each character encounters a point where choices and decisions have to be made, whether the journey is undertaken physically or on an emotional level. Geraint's pilgrimage may bring him full circle geographically, but it takes his life into a new direction. Each character's individual identity and voice emerges and evolves subtly as the narrative shifts from Welsh clifftop and museum back-rooms to the harsh light of the Greek coast. Relationships, a sense of place, past and present are subtly intertwined in this sensitive novel.
Cyfnewidfa Lên Cymru/Wales Literature Exchange