The Jeweller

That was the horror of love: your sweetheart could stick a knife into your eyeball and sharpen it a notch every chance they got. Mari supplements her modest stock as a market-stallholder with the trinkets she acquires clearing the houses of the dead. Living in a tiny cottage by the shore - alone apart from a pet cat and the monkey, Nanw - she surrounds herself with the lives of others, combing through letters she has gleaned and putting up photographs of strangers on her small mantelpiece for company. Mari is looking for something beyond saleable goods and borrowed memories. As she works on cutting the perfect emerald, she inches closer to a discovery that will transform her life and throw her relationships with old friends into relief. To move forward she must shed her life of things past and start again. How she does so is both surprising and shocking...

Caryl Lewis first came to prominence with Martha, Jac a Sianco (Y Lolfa, 2004), which won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2005. Her television adaptation of the book won 8 BAFTA Cymru awards in 2008. It is currently a settext and was included in the Guardian's list of 10 must-read books from around the world. Caryl won the Wales Book of the Year Award for the second time in 2016, with her tenth novel, Y Bwthyn (The Cottage, Y Lolfa, 2015). Her latest book, Y Gwreiddyn The Root), was published by the Lolfa in 2016, and won Caryl the fiction prize for the third time at the Welsh Book of the Year Awards 2017. Caryl also writes for children and has won the Tir Na N-og Award for best children's fiction twice in 2004 and 2015. Caryl's television credits include adapting Welsh-language scripts for the acclaimed crime series Y Gwyll / Hinterland which was produced back-to-back in Welsh and English. The series has been sold to international broadcasters in Denmark, Norway, Slovenia, Finland, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands. She is also a writer on and Associate Producer of Craith / Hidden a Welsh-noir series which airs on BBC One Wales and BBC 4. The second series is currently in production. She lives half way up a mountain in Mid Wales with her family, her chickens and her bees.