Vote for the Wales Book of the Year 2025 People’s Choice Award

Forester Gethin Thomas is struggling to make ends meet in his rural hometown in North Wales.

Bright, charming, but unambitious, the thing that keeps him going is Ty Gwydr, a beautiful lakeside house that he keeps an eye on for absent English owners.

The house has been empty for so long he's come to think of it as his own.

That is until the owners decide to sell, sending Geth into freefall.

And when he discovers that Olwen, his first love who left him and their small town for a new life in London, has returned to North Wales with her husband, Geth and Olwen will find themselves pulled back into the past and what could have been – or still could be.

But soon mysterious messages start arriving at the house, and they must question whether this is the love story they thought it was, or whether there might be something altogether more sinister lurking beneath the surface.

For all her life, idealistic 20-year-old bookworm Magdalena Arber has been split down the middle: veering wildly between fidelity to indoctrinated Nazi beliefs, and her father’s humanist values.

Then comes the summons–the Nazi War Labour Service is conscripting her into a teaching position in East Prussia. Magda is elated. It’s a release from the cosy cage of childhood, and a chance to form young minds.

She enters a lush rural world of forests, lakes, and meadows where order prevails. Yet there are monstrous hands out to shape the whole continuum of earthly creatures.

The Gestapo are a lurking darkness. There is bombing further East, and news of a moving Russian front.

Will Alt Schönbek burn as well?

Can Magda survive?

1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs.

The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep.

Unaware of the stranger's intentions, Ivar takes him into his home, and in spite of the two men having no common language, a fragile bond begins to form between them.

Meanwhile on the mainland, John's wife Mary anxiously awaits news of his mission.

Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us.

Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.

The language in Rhian Elizabeth’s poetry feels instinctual: the poems in Girls etc pulse and ripple with energy, their rhythms are perfectly pitched.

Elizabeth writes of personal experience with an intensity and sharpness that challenges you to look closely.

Girls etc showcases a defiance, alongside the beauty and vulnerability here, which resonates long after the last page is turned.

Rhian Elizabeth brings a breath of fresh air to contemporary poetry.

The poems in Natalie Ann Holborow’s Little Universe are an exploration of tumultuous human emotions and nature’s ever-present rhythms.

Lives bustle within a busy hospital’s walls, humming against the Gower landscape that stretches beyond its windows.

The tiny worlds of a wide cast unfold as they deal with their own emergencies, losses, recoveries, hopes and histories.

Medical students stride the length of the corridor in rubber shoes, scars running the lengths of their lives.

A janitor is crying in the Gents’, watching the flowers at the hospital entrance shrug themselves back into earth.

The biblical Lilith offers knowledge from one woman to the other. And somewhere in the distance, a bunker dissolves into gold upon Pennard’s shoulder, dusk folding to sleep on Rhossili.

The characters in this book are all bound by the undying pulse of existence ‒ yet their stories serve as a reminder that despite these stark contrasts, life persists

Portrait of a Young Girl Falling is unapologetic in its feminist exploration of desire, consent, identity, and gendered experience.

Katrina Moinet's poems tug at violences and tensions present in language, the way it constructs, shapes, limits, or opens up our conception of these things.

Stunning and experimental, this compact debut collection is brimming with fresh strategies of association, productive or interrogative ambiguities, multiplicities of meaning that make space for new ways of thinking.

In Tir – the Welsh word for ‘land’ – writer and naturalist Carwyn Graves takes us on a tour of seven key elements of the Welsh landscape, such as the ffridd, or mountainside pasture, and the rhos, or moorland.

By diving deep into the history and ecology of each of these landscapes, we discover that the land of Wales, in all its beautiful variety, is at base just as much a human cultural creation as a natural phenomenon: its raw materials evolved alongside the humans that have lived here since the ice receded.

In our modern era of climate concerns and polarised debates on land use, diet and more, it matters that we understand the world we are in and the roads we travelled to get here.

By exploring each of these key landscapes and meeting the people who live, work and farm in them, Tir offers hope for a better future; one with stunningly beautiful, richly biodiverse landscapes that are ten times richer in wildlife than they currently are, and still full of humans working the land.

In this extraordinary memoir, Gwyneth Lewis, the inaugural National Poet of Wales, recounts her toxic upbringing at the hands of her controlling, coercive mother.

It is a book that Gwyneth has been preparing to write all her life, in diaries that she’s kept since childhood.

In these journals, she interrogates the emotionally abusive mother/daughter relationship, in great pain but determined to find a way through.

The result is a book that Gwyneth co-writes with her younger self, an unexpected and life-saving dialogue through time.

Metaphors of haunting intensity help her confront what happened to her; quotations from art and literature help to guide and steady her.

Nightshade Mother is a book about the power of art, language and, ultimately, about homecoming after a lifetime of exile from herself.

It is a profoundly moving and beautiful work; questing, forgiving and loving in its approach.

For thousands of years, humans have been the architects of the natural world.

Our activities have permanently altered the environment – for good and for bad.

In Nature’s Ghosts, award-winning journalist Sophie Yeo examines how the planet would have looked before humans scrubbed away its diversity: from landscapes carved out by megafauna to the primeval forests that emerged following the last Ice Age, and from the eagle-haunted skies of the Dark Ages to the flower-decked farms of more recent centuries.

Uncovering the stories of the people who have helped to shape the landscape, she seeks out their footprints even where it seems there are none to be found.

And she explores the timeworn knowledge that can help to fix our broken relationship with the earth.

Along the way, Sophie encounters the environmental detectives – archaeological, cultural and ecological – reconstructing, in stunning detail, the landscapes we have lost.

Today, the natural world is more vulnerable than ever; the footprints of humanity heavier than they have ever been.

But, as this urgent book argues, from the ghosts of the past, we may learn how to build a more wild and ancient future.

Starting high school was never going to be easy for Mo, but a fall out with her so-called ʻfriendsʼ leaves her lonelier than ever.

Then she finds Onyx.

Exploring an abandoned Victorian asylum may seem a weird way to develop a friendship, but then Mo has always found she does things a bit differently.

Together they help each other accept their own differences even when others struggle to do the same.

Determined to keep the pair apart, Onyxʼs dad actions force them back to the secrecy of Denham asylum.

On Halloween night, with the old building due for demolition, the two friends enter for the last time…

Is Marcus's fate decided by his family? Or can he stand up for himself to become the person he really wants to be?

Marcus has one brother in a youth offender centre and the other is working with their dad on plans for their next theft.

Everyone assumes Marcus will follow in their footsteps, but he has other ideas, different hopes.

When a mysterious accident lands a man in hospital, it confirms what everyone in their community expects and Marcus gets the blame.

He feels trapped.

Only new girl Emma - with her peace protest banners and political badges - questions this story. Can they work together to clear his name – and help Marcus become the person he really wants to be?

An exciting and moving story about questioning your loyalties, from the acclaimed author of The Valley of Lost Secrets. Perfect for readers of 10+ who love Phil Earle, Frank Cottrell-Boyce or Brian Conaghan.

In this debut poetry collection for children Sarah takes the reader on a vibrant journey based on her acute observations of everyday life and language.

Loosely arranged across a school year - September through Halloween, Christmas, Spring, Summer holidays, a new school year/just before secondary - Sarah's witty observations, juxtapositions, and playful use of language pervade every poem and bring a vivid charm and freshness to every page.

This debut collection heralds the emergence of a strikingly new and inventive voice in children's poetry.