Aneurin Gareth Thomas was born in 1963 and brought up in Gorseinon, Swansea. He was in Madrid for many years and now lives in Brecon. This is his first novel.

A boy comes of age near Swansea. He belongs to the baby-boom generation but this is a time and place of bust. Eight-strong at the offset, his group of friends includes Will, a council estate intellectual, and Karen, who graduates from lonely cocktails on the dance floor to convivial militant vandalism. But first love ends for two of them in sordid circumstances, and the group is three down at the finish, when the narrator faces an uncertain future.

I was at the front gate watching Old Tommy the Commie enlightening a tracksuited Timmy Sugar Ray Jenkins, our local semi-pro boxer, as to the social function of violent spectator sports in capitalist society. Timmy Sugar Ray was just sweating and puffing indifferently as he jogged on the spot...

This novel explores the emergence of political identity, which grows from class to national consciousness and celebrates that brand of idealism that has never since the early Eighties recaptured its clarity of purpose.

Luggage from Elsewhere
It is 1966 and in a coal-mining district a four-year-old boy is thrown into a filthy pool by a gang of older boys. He survives, but his lungs and his life will remain marked by that poisonous baptism of pit-water, black with coal-dust. With his group of friends he traces his journey through adolescence in company with the increasingly crazy but natural leader Parry, the stuttering Dai Panda, and little Johnny Evans, the prostitute's son. Youthfull initiation into drink, sex, drugs, petty crime and casual violence are set against rough-and-ready but affectionate family life in a community not yet fully post-industrial, where everyone still knows everyone else. Gradually, however, the cracks in the inherited fabric widen as individuals and communities struggle to redefine themselves. New kinds of politics and social networks emerge and the narrator finds his mother leaving for Greenham Common women's peace camp whilst his new, middle-class girlfriend, Sian, introduces him to Welsh-language campaigns. Living in the borderland between Welsh-speaking and English-speaking districts, he faces the rites of passage from childhood into young adulthood in the crucial first years of Margaret Thatcher's reign, and as her policies begin to bite he treads his path to the inevitable but still unexpected conclusion.
Paradoxes and tensions are revealed within a community whose traditional self-image is challenged by the harsh realities of contemporary life. But the darkness is leavened by humour and by warmth without sentimentality. Equally at home evoking domestic detail or urban wasteland, Aneurin Gareth Thomas's first novel captures the feel of the south Wales of his childhood with a kaleidoscope of characters, conveyed with a keen ear for authentic dialogue.
Cyfnewidfa Lên Cymru/Wales Literature Exchange