Reprint 2021 with Addendum outlining key changes in the town since 2013
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| Available from the Publisher |
This is tmy hometown: upbeat and offbeat, tpopular and outcast, explored through local history research, contemporary issues, poetry and memoir. And there's quite a bit of food in there too, including a prawn risotto to make you sing and an affogato to watch the sunsets with.
Amazon Review
Most people regard Port Talbot as a dusty industrial wasteland, and there might be an element of truth in that. However, Lynne Rees has explored the nooks and crannies of her home town and laid low this popular misconception. She has captured wonderfully the essence of its landscape, history and people. From the zany Baked Bean Museum to the natural beauty of Margam Park you'll be guided through what makes Port Talbot tick. No dry tome this. Lynne's fondness for Port Talbot shines through and her many witty remarks make for entertaining reading. The snippets of personal information that permeate the book make you feel by the end of it that Lynne is an old friend. The only way to find the real Port Talbot is to read this book. Thoroughly recommended. John Davies
the hungry writer is a simmered reduction of my hungry writer blog from 2010 to 2015. You'll find 52 stories about living in France, family visits to Wales and about my home on an apple farm in Kent, plus poems, childhood memories, a clutch of personal recipes and full colour photographs, as well as 365 Hungry Writing Prompts for apprentice and practising writers who would like to build or sustain a daily writing habit. Eat. Live. Write.
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Out of print
Taste, scent, memories and recipes melt into a glorious blend of food, from the South of France to her native Wales and Kent, life-enhancing vignettes about cooking and looking at the world – and practical advice about learning to write as well as she does. Lynne Rees has served up a sumptuous feast for mind, body and soul.
Deborah Lawrenson, bestselling author of The Lantern and The Sea Garden
The life of a hungry writer is a life of craving, reflection and deep engagement, and The Hungry Writer captures all aspects of that rich way of being. The book tells multiple and interconnected stories: of sources of inspiration and a commitment to inspiring others; of sourcing food and the joy of feeding others; and of the three big themes: love and loss and home. And all told with a passion for words and writing, and a profoundly moving generosity of spirit.
Shaun Levin, creator of The Writing Notebooks
Authors who love eating as much as writing know that words have flavour and provide sustenance, and that a good read is a satisfying meal for the soul. In this sense, Lynne Rees is a chef, and The Hungry Writer is a feast.
Suzan Colón, author of Cherries in Winter: My Family’s Recipe for Hope in Hard Times
A multifaceted memoir of home: of children and parents, joy and fear, dreams and desires, and, ultimately, the inherent wonder of ordinary lives. These contemporary haibun combine the narrative power of prose with the epiphanies of haiku poetry to question and explore where home is, how we recognise it, how we leave it, and how we find our way back.
Bashō did this. On his narrow road north. He wrote what he saw and what he felt. Wound his prose around his haiku, studded his creative world with perfect places. Lynne Rees is on the same journey. These are scenes from a life: childhood, adulthood, passion, age, joy, pain. Her haiku are headlamps. Her prose flowing water. I couldn’t put it down. Peter Finch
Available directly from me for £8.99 (including p&p) within the UK. Email/write for paypal details and for postage costs for Europe and the Rest of the World.
Another Country, Haiku Poetry from Wales co-editor with Nigel Jenkins and Ken Jones
The first anthology of its kind to celebrate the literary wealth of haiku and its associated forms created both within Wales and by Welsh writers internationally from the 1960s to the present.
This is an important contribution, not only to Welsh literature in English but also to all writing of haiku and its related forms in the English language. Paul Griffiths
£9.99 from Gomer Press: orders@gomer.co.uk
The Oven House
Available on Kindle
…she feels raw, like burnt skin, like nails broken below the quick, the breath in her throat as sharp as razors, though she has no right to feel any of this, as she is the one burning and breaking and cutting up the life they have shared for ten years.
Breeze is married, still in love with her husband, and absorbed in running her own second-hand bookshop. Then she notices the man standing behind her in the coffee shop, the book in his hands. How is it possible to feel so happy in the company of someone she’s just met? And why should that happiness feel so illicit?
The Oven House doesn't just tell a compelling story: Lynne Rees's sensuous prose makes us re-experience love, betrayal and recovery in our own bodies. She writes as a poet, in the best sense. Susan Wicks
Breeze is married, still in love with her husband, and absorbed in running her own second-hand bookshop. Then she notices the man standing behind her in the coffee shop, the book in his hands. How is it possible to feel so happy in the company of someone she’s just met? And why should that happiness feel so illicit?
The Oven House doesn't just tell a compelling story: Lynne Rees's sensuous prose makes us re-experience love, betrayal and recovery in our own bodies. She writes as a poet, in the best sense. Susan Wicks
The Oven House is filled with the ripe pleasure of sexual indulgence, of the particular agonies that are irrevocably linked to both falling in and out of love and the uniquely lush joy that comes from falling in love with someone all over again. Book Reviews Online
Lynne Rees' novel is a journey into the isolation created by a passionate love affair that gradually disintegrates leaving the woman precipitously close to breakdown. A window through every emotional state from ecstasy to despair, Rees' novel is a poetic and eloquent study in guilt. Breeze, as her husband calls her, knows she cannot return her marriage to its previously comfortable state, but neither can she desert in pursuit of a new life with her lover after he abandons her. She flounders instead, in an unhappy limbo until she begins a gradual shift towards recovery. Mslexia
Learning How to Fall
[Lynne Rees] shakes the familiar world of common things and makes us see it anew. Gillian Clarke
This is serious poetry which is also approachable and immediate, capable of attracting a first-time reader of poetry as well as satisfying the seasoned reader. Philip Gross
…endlessly inventive… Todd Swift, Magma
…this first full collection demonstrates her fierce intelligence, wit and technical ability. Lynne is a skilled imagist and this is a consistently rewarding book. Catherine Smith, The New Writer
Messages
Oulipo has mostly been a playground for the boys, so it is refreshing to see it inhabited playfully here by Rees and Salway. Perhaps their three hundred three-hundred word messages don’t add up to a ‘proper book’, but readers treated to this lucky dip of tiny tales — including useful tips on where to hide a dead body, where to order a talking man and perhaps best of all, a story involving killer broccoli — won’t be asking for their money back. Pulp
Lynne Rees and Sarah Salway’s delightful Messages, where prose poem meets sexy short fiction is a book most women will enjoy having next to the bed. Susan Wicks
Lynne Rees and Sarah Salway’s delightful Messages, where prose poem meets sexy short fiction is a book most women will enjoy having next to the bed. Susan Wicks