The book
Daniel Walters is a London geologist who trusts rock over feeling. When his firm wins a survey on Parys Mountain, the copper-scarred hill above Amlwch where he spent his teens, he goes back to Anglesey for work, and finds the island has other plans.
There is a silent wood with not a bird in it. A stone circle on no map. A copper amulet that passes every test he can think of. A woman called Rhiannon who seems to know him. And there is a second problem, set squarely in the present: the American mine he is surveying would poison the river and the town it promises to save. Nobody lies to him. There are no villains, only decent people protecting what they have to. What Daniel does is tell the truth to the people it will touch, at a real cost to himself.
Whether Rhiannon is a woman, a memory or a grief is left for the reader to decide, and the book works whichever they choose.
It is warm, funny and unhurried, with the rhythms of Welsh speech in its English, and with pubs, sheepdog trials, wet weeks on the mountain and a plygain by candlelight on Christmas morning. Beneath it runs a quieter question: what happens to the stories nobody writes down?
The opening
Read the prologue (about 400 words)
It was another day, another lesson. Fifteen years old, and the summer everyone else was talking about was still weeks away — the one the whole country would end up celebrating for a generation, eleven men and a cup nobody in this classroom had won yet. Daniel didn’t much care about football. He had other things on his mind, or thought he did.
Daniel wasn’t daydreaming, but he wasn’t present either — until, without warning, his senses went into overdrive.
Mrs Samson, the school secretary, had entered the classroom and was whispering in Mr Roberts’s ear. Heads nodded. Two sets of eyes found Daniel and stayed there. He felt the heat rising in his face, though he couldn’t have said why. Something wasn’t right.
There was no mistake. His name was called, along with the ominous news that the headmaster wanted to see him.
This is mad, he thought. I haven’t done anything. Not that he could think of, anyway — not for one of the class swots.
He got up from the desk and followed Mrs Samson out, down the corridor, through what felt like no time at all until he was standing at the headmaster’s door. Still dazed. Still afraid.
He pushed it open and had to look twice. His mother was sitting in the chair beside the headmaster’s desk, her eyes red, wet.
Words moved around the room. He couldn’t make them hold still long enough to mean anything.
Then the fog lifted, and the shock came through it.
His grandfather — his beloved grandfather — had died. Suddenly, without anyone getting the chance to say what needed saying.
By the time Daniel was in the car home, the wheels were already turning — invisible ones, but turning all the same, carrying him toward a different timeline, a different future, one he hadn’t chosen and didn’t yet understand. He would never set foot in that school again. He didn’t know it yet, walking out through those doors for what he thought was just another afternoon.
A few short weeks later, and not quite sixteen, he was standing outside a school he’d never seen before, on an island he’d never heard of, very alone, very afraid. Somewhere behind him, that summer, a nation would win a World Cup and remember it forever. Daniel would remember the summer for a different reason.
Anglesey.
Agents & publishers
The novel is complete and I am seeking literary representation. A one-page synopsis, a chapter-by-chapter synopsis and sample chapters are ready, and the full manuscript is available on request.