Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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Derceto (also known as Atargatis or Siriadea), from Oedipus Aegyptiacus by Athanasius Kircher, 1652. For example, there is quite a bit of telling when it comes to Joseph’s romantic relations and his evening trips to the pub: ‘She had lit like a struck match, her anger flaming, and turned her back on him until he placed his hand on her hip, tugged her towards him.

She'll do anything to protect him, including using her mysterious relationship with the sea to keep him safe. The story centres around brother and sister Joseph and Nefyn, who live together in their family cottage on a cliff edge overlooking the ocean – it is just the two of them, since their parents are both dead.This storyline is delineated in remarkably few strokes, the pain of dementia a sad echo of an earlier pain in the marriage, namely infertility, where “their failure had turned to sadness, and sadness to silence”. Drift is a rare novel imbued with the lingering aura of the mythic story – a reminder that good writing can shine hope on even the darkest issues of grief and war. The deadening of the sea as the weight of the storm rolled in, a deep disconcerting inhalation of the sky. The very difficult reality of ageing with dementia is explored and even this has a beauty and tenderness which brought me to tears.

And there’s an exciting animation project as well, based on one of my little picture books, around bees.It is striking how ‘everyone knew about Nefyn’s father’ – how he abused Arianell – and did nothing about it, though he ‘threatened [people] into silence’. Here is the crisp and emotive prose of an athletic storyteller – one who’s novel, Martha, Jac a Sianco, is already considered a modern classic in Welsh literature – and she holds no truck with magical themes shrouded in prettified obscurity.