Niall Griffiths Books In Order

Grits

In the late 1990s, a group of young drifters from various parts of Britain find themselves washed up together in a small town on the west coast of Wales, fixed between mountains and sea. Here, they both explore and attempt to overcome those yearnings and addictions that have brought them to this place: promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, petty crime, and the intense and angry search for the meaning they feel life lacks at the back end of a momentous century. From the author of Sheepshagger, a work of power, passion, and enormous originality.

Sheepshagger

This is the story of Ianto: the feral, inarticulate, inbred, ignoble savage; haunter of mountains, killer of innocents. Ianto is a Sheepshagger a yokel, a Welsh redneck. But Ianto is also a seer, a visionary the genius loci who comprehends nature with a Blakean intensity, and is at one with the world he lives in: the moss and lichen, the lamb and the raven, the summit and the scree. Robbed of his ancestral home a near derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales Ianto pledges revenge not only on the English yuppies who have turned his grandmother’s cottage into a weekenders’ barbecue party but on all those who have violated him and the land that is his. The oppression and abuse that Ianto has faced triggers his lurid imagination into unspeakable savagery embodying the most primal fears of physical threat and a world beyond his control. An extraordinary prose amalgam of Old Testament prophecy and demotic slang, of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, Sheepshagger is written in a language charged to the highest level: lyrical and hieratic, saturated like nature in beauty and violence. And the spirit of its place, Ianto, at once both Caliban and Prospero, will hang in the memory of all who read his story like a devil or a god.

Kelly and Victor

A dark and disturbing new novel about sadomasochism from the acclaimed author of Grits and Sheepshagger.

A bar in Liverpool, January 2, 2000. Victor, coming down from the recent global party, meets a girl. Some time later that night he is in her bed. This, he thinks, is the best sex he’s ever had. Kelly, coming down after the recent global party, meets a boy. Some time later that night he is in her bed. This, she thinks, is the best sex she s ever had.

So the story of Kelly & Victor progresses, through two mirror image narratives: the spiraling intensity of a sexual obsession traced to an inevitable, devastating conclusion. Set against a backdrop of urban despair, spiritual absence and a world swamped with po*rnography, it is, above all, a love story or what the 21st century will allow of one.

Stump

Stump makes you feel that you are reading on the edge of a life in a fierce gale, vulnerable, excited, alive. The Guardian London

Wet an spectacular wreckage leads to powerful forgetting which leads to periodics which lead to the dry drunks which go to immersion an enabler an therapeutic alliance an any alternative, any fu*ckin alternative atropine aversion therapy or Antabuse or ECT or acufu*ckinpuncture or snakepits or swimming with dolphins an all of that all of it comes completely back to this one pure irreducible phenomenon: a booming heart that burns to drink.

It has taken the loss of a limb and a death threat from the Mob to make one Liverpudlian dry out and move to a small seaside town in Wales. But his past life is a recurring nightmare filth, desperation, and blackouts. And more trouble is only a hundred miles away. Darren and Alastair leave Liverpool, heading south in a rickety old car. They have been sent by their gang boss to wreak violent revenge, but they have only a rough idea of their quarry: a one armed man.

Interspersed between the scabrous banter and a pitch perfect street dialect, Niall Griffiths offers stunning descriptions of the Welsh landscape and a dark, knowing humor. Despite the ever present drugs, violence, and anger, he reveals a fragile humanity. Graywolf is proud to introduce this striking, distinctive voice to American readers.

Wreckage

Wreckage is a really remarkable piece of work. In the foreground is a caper story; in the background, a poetically expressed, apocalyptic history of Liverpool. The Daily Telegraph
That woman with the grey hair and the specs and the kind face and the accent all like his grandmother, his nain in hospital and when she can talk that is what she sounds like. Don thitmepleasedon thitme. These women falling, sliding off this earth and not just from violence but the one commonality that turns life to a wreck age. After their botched and brutal mission to punish a one armed man in a small Welsh village, Darren and Alastair head back to Liverpool to report to their mob boss. On the way home, Darren robs a rural postal office in Wales that serves as a bank and needlessly cracks the skull of a little old postal lady. Darren’s eyes are full of fire. We re rich, Alastair! But Alastair sees his own nain in this elderly woman and falls victim to his conscience. Darren has finally gone too far.
As Alastair and Darren weave their way through the lowlife milieu of Liverpool, we hear many voices: the alky, the crack addict, the busman, the who*res, the gangsters, and Darren s many victims. But we also hear the voices of their ancestors going back generations of unthinkable grief and poverty.
A fascinating sequel to Stump, which Irvine Welsh calls a magnificent novel of loss and obsession…
by a major talent.

Runt

On leaving school a sixteen year old boy goes to live with his uncle on a remote Welsh hill farm. His aunt has recently committed suicide after losing her livestock in the foot and mouth epidemic and his uncle has turned, once again, to the bottle. The boy is an innocent, a spiritual savant; his uncle sees him as a shaman. An unwitting repository of folk memory, he is a boy from the margins: barely educated but possessed of extraordinary insights; barely literate but able to speak a language of his own a poetry laden with Pagan and Christian myth. He is unaware that he is gifted, unaware of what he knows in general which is probably for the best since the enormity of his knowledge, were it to be understood, would crush him. During one of his ecstatic trances the boy learns that he has an appointed role in the world, which he must discover for himself. During an episode of brutal and climactic violence, he does exactly that. Told through the boy’s internal monologue of beauty and damage, ‘Runt’ is a powerful, disturbing and moving novel that reinvigorates the language of fiction and illuminates domestic tragedy with a penetrating epic light.

Real Aberystwyth

This guidebook provides a remarkable overview of the Welsh town Aberystwyth a community of two languages that contains a university, a farming community, a port turned marina, the National Library of Wales, provides a home for writers and spies alike, and was also made recently famous or infamous by Malcolm Pryce’s novels. The travel guide details an enthralling account of a city that is any number of conflicting and complimentary things from its medieval beginnings through its Victorian heyday to the fluid mix of longstanding natives, large student population, and colony of those who came and never left. Mixing autobiography with topography, aligning the oblique approach with historical report, and contrasting the prosaic with the downright odd, this study paints a vivid picture of a world famous town.

Real Liverpool

A vivid, witty, and darkly humorous account of of the city of Liverpool, this work explores the various facets of the city its maritime and merchant histories, class divisions, sectarian divides, Celtic influences, and the siege mentality underpinning the celebrated Scouse humor. Nor does this reference flinch from Liverpool’s dark side: the drugs, the urban blight, the fallout from Thatcherism, and the internecine violence. In addition, the narrative is underpinned by a strong autobiographical element detailing the author’s birth and formative years in the city, his movement away from it, and the abiding pull it exerts and features interviews with many people connected closely to Liverpool, from personal friends and family members to artists and workers. From the Wirral to Warrington, Anfield to Everton, Bootle to Diddyland, this memoir criss crosses the city by the ferry and through the tunnels, from John Lennon airport to the racecourse and down the docks, building a picture of a city which, whatever its faults, is never dull.