Dark days in Wales: Of Talons and Teeth, by Niall Griffiths, reviewed

This book has taken me far too long to read, and not for the usual reasons (that it’s too long, it’s rubbish, idleness, I lost it, etc.) but because I could only manage ten pages a day before getting a kind of mental nosebleed. And that is because it is so good, so different. There is a note at the back from the publishers, of whom I had not heard: ‘Repeater Books is dedicated to the creation of a new reality.’ There follows some invective about capitalist realism in historical fiction and ends: ‘We are alive and we don’t agree.’ I would say that this book fulfils their brief admirably.

We are in Wales at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The last wolves are being hunted, the little people have left for the realm of legend and a begrimed and barely literate populace struggles for existence in the shadow of a mountain being hollowed out by new mineworks.