Broken Ghost - Niall Griffiths (Paperback) 13-08-2020

**WINNER OF THE 2020 WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD** 'A magnificently gifted writer' Irvine Welsh A Welsh community witnesses a strange vision: the huge spectre of a woman floating over a ridge. Is it a collective hallucination, a meteorological phenomenon, or something supernatural? The individuals living in these mountains are already battling their own demons - of drink, drugs, domestic violence, depression - how could an apparition unite these crushed people or their fragmented country? This is a novel that gives voices to the marginalised, the dispossessed, the forgotten. An examination of modern humanity's desperate need to live meaningfully and vividly in a mediated world - where individual autonomy is lost and the collective heart is atomised and exploited. Disturbing and unforgettable, darkly funny and deeply moving, it is written in a charged language that is vernacular, lyrical and hieratic all at once. Broken Ghost is a howl of anguish and a summoning of gods. 'Combines myth, drug culture and iconoclastic political vision in a wild music that's also a call to arms' New Statesman, Books of the Year 'Griffiths has forged a chimerical piece of radical fiction, a Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time.' Guardian 'This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page.' Daily Mail