FLOWERS OF VITRIOL
It is 1817 and on the streets of Amlwch, the copper capital of the world, anger amongst the poor, the hungry and the disaffected, is about to break out into open violence. Mine Superintendent, Thomas Kendrick, brings his bride, the beautiful Cornish girl, Alys, twenty year his junior, home to Amlwch. The arrival of the Irish sea captain, and his friendship with Kendrick, sets off an intriguing tale of love, jealousy, treachery and blackmail…
The Weeping Sands
The Weeping Sands is a captivating historical saga interweaving four tales of love and loss through four centuries in the life of Baron Hill, Anglesey’s ancestral mansion.
Jenna Shaw, 32, children`s TV presenter, is invited to take part in a TV show exploring her ancestry, a quest which will take her, ultimately, to the ruined mansion of Baron Hill, in Beaumaris, Anglesey. 350 years earlier, Thomas Cheadle, despised for his affair with Lady Anne Bulkeley, and blamed for the death of her husband, prepares to play his part as the Civil War reaches Wales. Isobel Harcourt, recovering from a breakdown following a failed love affair with artist, James Pennington, and in the protection of her sister, is taken to Beaumaris, Anglesey, to convalesce. The year is 1831.
How do Isobel`s strange delusions link the past and the present? What will be the outcome of Jenna`s quest?
A Golden Mist
In 1859, `The Royal Charter`, a steam clipper, returning from Melbourne, carrying 500 passengers and crew, and laden with bullion from the Australian gold fields, was wrecked in hurricane conditions at Moelfre, on the coast of Anglesey. Only forty people survived. A hundred and fifty years later, Saffy Williams, visiting the UK from South Africa, finds evidence that one of her ancestors lived in Moelfre at the time. In two fictional contemporary narratives, the diary of Sophia Davis on board `The Royal Charter`, and the memoir of Richard Williams, a young man living in Moelfre in 1859, the story of the lost treasure ship and the lives and passions of people associated with it, is told.
The Papers of Matthew Locke
When Matthew Locke survives a shipwreck on the coast of Anglesey, he is cared for by the family of Llyws Llewellyn in the fishing village of Rhosneigr. During his recovery from the ordeal, he finds himself slipping through boundaries of time, becoming involved in events from Anglesey`s mysterious past. In these episodes, he meets, in different guises, Bryony, Llwys Llewellyn`s elder daughter, and it is here that their strange love affair begins. Set in Anglesey in the 1880s, and beginning with the loss of `The Norman Court`, a clipper in the Java sugar trade, John Wheatley`s novel explores the shadowy territory between history, myth and fantasy.
The Exile`s Daughter
From the windswept coast of Wales to the trenches of Europe, no one escapes the tides of history.
The Exile’s Daughter is a sweeping historical novel interweaving the fates of displaced Poles, rural Welsh villagers, and the shifting fronts of the First World War.
The story opens with a flash-forward to 1914, Olsztyn, Poland, with a deadly explosion that sweeps up a young Polish soldier into German captivity. Wounded and shuffled between work camps, he witnesses the grim realities of forced labour and the shifting fortunes of war, from Tannenberg to the Western Front.
His story is interspersed with that of Lauren Bucievski. In 1905, when Lauren and her father take flight from Poland during the 1905 revolution, the ten year old girl has little understanding of who her father`s enemies are. Seven years later – now living in Church Bay on the remote west coast of Anglesey – she befriends the happy-go-lucky Jimmy Jilkes. When the charismatic Stefan turns up from Poland, her life is thrown into conflict, vulnerable as she is, in her isolation, to her own dawning sexuality.
he outbreak of war in 1914 becomes the defining factor in how each of their destinies will turn out.
Through richly drawn vignettes, the narrative moves between Lauren’s quiet but watchful life in North Wales and the war engulfing Europe,
Told with vivid historical detail and intimate character work, Exile is a novel of survival, exile, and the thin lines between safety and danger, home and displacement. It captures the slow rhythms of rural life against the relentless churn of world events, exploring how ordinary moments—a glass of water, a smile, a walk to the bay—can echo across lives shaped by history’s largest upheavals.
