The Priest's Wife
Author: A G Rivett
Bryn Glas Books
Scroll down for Pantolwen Press titles
and the latest blog posts from Gillian Paschkes-Bell
Vu
Author: Kenneth Sinclair
The Seaborne
Author: A. G. Rivett
What Kind of Book is VU?
What kind of book is Kenneth Sinclair’s Vu? Reviewing for the Historical Novel Society, Susie Helme exclaims: “I’ve never seen a book like this!” She goes on to describe every paragraph as “a jewel, an…
Read Post
From Jean Moulin to Giverny, via Chartres. And Proust.
Walking up the the street in Chartres, heading for the cathedral, you turn a corner, and come upon this face: Jean Moulin, a hero of the French Resistance. After unifying its main networks, he became…
Read Post
Looking across the quad to Darlington's Great Hall
How to use history
The Historical Novel Society chose a venue steeped in over a thousand years of history for its 2024 conference, held at the Dartington Estate in Devon. We met and mingled in medieval buildings where once…
Read Post
Film poster
This Being Human – Panʼs Labyrinth
What is it about Spanish culture that enables their film-makers to create such masterly evocations of other-worldly states? We recently watched Panʼs Labyrinth (El laborinto del fauno), the award-winning 2006 film by Guillermo del Toro that opens…
Read Post
Journey to St Ives
Truth and Priorities: The Serpentine Cave
The quest for truth is central to Jill Paton Walshʼs 1997 novel, The Serpentine Cave. It is explored in different ways, on different levels. Honesty in business dealings… The gradual realisation that a person is…
Read Post
Cave explorer looking at flowstone formations by Cheile Cutler, curated by Adrian Mag on Unsplash
Initiation Rites – The Womb of the Mountain
Several readers of The Priestʼs Wife have commented on the passage in which Morag, the protagonist, descends to a cave deep in a mountain and there spends three days and nights in darkness. The Priestʼs Wife is…
Read Post
Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash
Sycamore Gap
This Easter, we heard Newcastleʼs Bishop Helen-Ann give the Good Friday meditation on BBC Radio 4: reflections arising from the felling of the tree at the Sycamore Gap which, for three hundred years, grew beside…
Read Post
Epona is always seen with horses
World’s End
A late summerʼs evening. The doors thrown wide, light and warmth attracting some members of the local insect population to join us. A full auditorium, listening to the broadcaster and storyteller, Euros Lewis, taking us…
Read Post
New light kindled in the dark of the tree
A Sense of Otherness
This January, the Bryn Glas Blog has a guest post from A G Rivett, who writes about the sense of Otherness that is an essential part of being human. How that is conveyed – or not…
Read Post
Heatherfield on The Park at Findhorn
How I Became a Publisher – Nature and Spirit and Us
Since January I’ve aimed to write a post a month on the Bryn Glas Blog and for ten twelfths of the year I succeeded. Intense activity around the time of the publication of The Priestʼs…
Read Post
First edition cover
An Unknown Woman
This post is the second of my series about women who, against the odds, arrive at some form of emancipation. (My first post on this theme was: The Godmother—Can You be Too Honest?) I like…
Read Post
Jacket design
Things Fall Apart
“Read this,” said a friend. “Itʼs different.” For the first time I was to be transported to the world of an African village by a writer whose words felt authentic. Chinua Achebeʼs 1958 novel,…
Read Post
Earth, Air, Fire and Water on Penbryn Beach
An Elemental Reading of The Seaborne
I spent the first weekend of July in Lampeter, at a gathering focused on Yoga, Ayurveda and the Cultivation of Harmony put on by the Harmony Institute of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.…
Read Post
Editor and Author at the Logie Steading Bookshop
The Seaborne by A G Rivett – the inside story
Listening to the BBC Radio 4 version of Haydn Middleton’s novella, The Ballad of Syd and Morgan (by Roger James Elsgood, broadcast on May 20th 2023), I heard Morgan (E M Forster) explain to his…
Read Post
Old Street Publishing 2019 edition
The Godmother – Can you be too honest?
With The Godmother, I begin a short series of occasional blog posts on novels about women who, against the odds, arrive at some form of emancipation. What form that takes depends, not only on the…
Read Post
Eric, taken by himself
RIP dear Eric
It was on the first anniversary of the start of the present Ukraine war, a day when Jupiter and Venus – Joy and Love – were conjunct, that a small gathering of family and friends…
Read Post
Stock photo on Unsplash
Where’s Frodo?
This month, it will be a year since the war on Ukraine began. I mark this by going back to an essay written by a Russian and published in The Guardian on 27 February 2022.…
Read Post
Glastonbury tor - drone picture on Unsplash
“Godʼs back!”
“Godʼs back!” I quote Tim Freke, sharing the current cutting edge of his philosophy at a wonderful New Year retreat Andrew and I have just attended where he lives in Glastonbury. (Andrew is my husband.…
Read Post
Stock photo
Heading for the Light
I was once told that spiritual traditions tend to place too much emphasis on Light, since Darkness is just as important in getting any creative process going – as anyone who has ever planted a…
Read Post
Detail from cover: woodcut by Andrew Davidson
Losing the Ego – thoughts arising from Neil Ansell’s ‘Deep Country’
Iʼm part of a book club, and some weeks ago another member was offering around a few books she wanted to move on. The one that called to me was Deep Country by Neil Ansell.…
Read Post
Programme notes cover
Operation Julie – How to Change Your Mind
We went to see Operation Julie, the new rock musical from Theatr Na nÓg that premiered in the Aberystwyth Arts Centre, toured to Brecon, and then to the Lyric at Carmarthen, which is where we…
Read Post
James Fox looks at an Egyptian figurine
Nature and Us
In this first post of the Bryn Glas Blog I want to begin with the big picture and describe how I feel about our present global situation. And Iʼd like to begin as I intend…
Read PostQuote from Vu by Kenneth Sinclair
Coming out from Pantolwen
Press, spring 2024
— Time to begin, she said.
And so that night, the black hulls of the Greeks already on the blue Aegean, bound for Troy. The long sea oars drip diamond drops that flash in the noonday sun. In all beginnings there is a magic force.
If you like to stay comfortable, reading a book might be a dangerous thing to do. Through the pages of a book, you might change the way you view the world. If you have access to books, you can go anywhere in imagination. You can read at your own pace, and re-read as often as you like.
Anyone who’s had the pleasure of immersing themselves in a book knows the power of fine writing and well-crafted story-telling to draw them in. You may emerge inspired or disturbed. You may have encountered truths you only dimly guessed at before. It’s this transformative potential that Bryn Glas Books seeks to uphold.
Photographs clockwise from top left by Aaron Burden, Christin Hume, Jilbert Ibrahimi and Seven Shooter. Available on Unsplash.