Broken Ghost

A visionary novel from the edge of the world. A Welsh community is drawn together and blown apart by a strange vision in the mountains: the huge spectre of a woman floating over a ridge. The people who live here in these mountains already have their own demons drink, drugs, domestic violence, psychoses but each character has a different experience of this strange apparition, a different reaction, and for some it will change everything. Is it a collective hallucination? A meteorological phenomenon? Whatever it is, they all saw something, early one morning on the shores of a mountain lake, something that will awaken in them powers and passions and, perhaps, a possibility of healing these broken people in a broken country.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 this is a novel that gives voices to the marginalised, the dispossessed, the forgotten. Disturbing and unforgettable, darkly funny and deeply moving, written in a charged language that is vernacular, lyrical and hieratic all at once, Broken Ghost is simultaneously 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. This important book outstrips even its own virtuoso literary technique New Statesman