Penwys
Imagine if your hometown – those quiet corners and unusual characters, its beloved pubs and tatty parks – were built on a lie so vast it takes magic, madness and myth to describe it. Welcome to Penwys.
The story of the city’s history is told as one of grandeur and Great Men. But that is not the only history at work. There is much else hidden or forgotten within the worn rock and wrought stone, and it is starting to make itself known…
The novel is about histories and the singular importance of pubs.
Currently being queried with agents.
Seattle
A novel about a brother and sister visiting the Soviet Union. They come from wildly different politics, but are united by a quiet and terrible grief, and their deep love for an orphaned child. How does their journey to ‘the new civilisation’ shape their own relationship, their hopes in the face of a darkening future, and how do their travels impact those they meet?
Currently in draft.
Coperniciana
A short-story collection, themed around the Copernican Revolution – the ‘de-centering’ of human knowledge and perception. The stories cover a wide-range of themes and approaches: interrogations of grief, strange journeys in fog, scholarship, myth and infidelity, a woman discovering herself in a blooming desert…
Currently in draft.
My influences are too numerous to exhaust, but everything counts. From childhood one meets C S Lewis, Arthur Ransome, Malcolm Saville, J R R Tolkien, Tamora Pierce, and any number of books that now I only remember the covers of, not even the titles, but I know I read them time and time again. Later came others: Achebe, Beckett, Borges, Bulgakov, Dillard, Enard, Joyce, Lampedusa, Murdoch, Nabokov, Swift (G and J),Turgenev. In a million ways, small and large, these and so many other writers have shaped my understandings – not only of writing, but of much else.
Nicholas S Hall - Writer 