Pondweed
Published on 1. July 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
304 pages
978-1-912408-72-6 (ISBN)
Description
With a nod to `Last Tango in Halifax¿, this `last tango in Wales¿ is loosely based on Lisäs widowed Great-Granny Gladys, who got chatting to an elderly gentleman at the bus stop who turned out to be her childhood sweetheart.
In Pondweed, pond supplies salesman Selwyn Robby arrives home one Monday afternoon towing the Toogood Aquatics exhibition caravan and orders his like-wife, Imogen `Ginny¿ Dare, to get into the car. He¿s taking her on a little holiday, he says. To Wales.
So begins their road trip west, via blasts from Selwyn¿s past, and a fortnight¿s journey of self-discovery for them both. But it¿s a fishy business towing this caravan, with its saucy mermaid curtains and fully stocked bar, and Ginny must untangle the pondweed to get to the bottom of it, even it does mean unearthing her own murky past to find out.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Brighton
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 192 mm
Width: 125 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
264 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-912408-72-6 (9781912408726)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Lisa Blower won The Guardian National Short Story Award in 2009, and was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2013 and longlisted for The Sunday Times Short Story Award in 2018.
Her fiction has appeared in The Guardian, Comma Press anthologies, The New Welsh Review, The Luminary, Short Story Sunday, and on Radio 4. She is a contributor to Common People edited by Kit de Waal.
Her debut novel Sitting Ducks was shortlisted for the inaugural Arnold Bennett Prize 2017 and longlisted for The Guardian Not the Booker 2016.
She has a PhD from Bangor University and is now senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Wolverhampton University. Her academic interests are the short story, creative nonfiction and working-class fictions. In 2016, Lisa was appointed the first-ever Writer in Residence at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery. Supported by Arts Council England, the residency enabled her to start her second novel, Green Blind, a contemporary re-imagining of Mary Webb¿s Gone to Earth that tackles the politics of fracking and land ownership in rural Shropshire.
Lisa was producer and curator of the 2015 Wenlock Poetry Festival, hosted a series of Literary Salons and Creative Writing courses for Shropshire Libraries, is a member of Writing West Midlands¿ Room 204, and Arvon tutor.