Stump

Black farce from the author of Kelly + Victor and Sheepshagger.

He is an epic and, at moments, visionary writer-Griffiths, through this man's gentle but raging voice, gives one of the great depictions of alcoholism

Niall Griffiths is an actual literary star. He writes with vim and sympathy about the things young people do

In the top rank of contemporary British authors...He brings tremendous rhythm and energy to his prose

Stump is the author's gentlest and funniest book by far-He has a prose style as compelling and seductive as any writer in the land

The range of Griffiths's achievement is as exhilarating as the reach of his ambition

Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966 and now lives in Wales. He has published six other novels: Grits, Sheepshagger, Kelly + Victor, Wreckage, Runt and A Great Big Shining Star. The film of Kelly + Victor will be released shortly.

A newcomer has arrived in a small Welsh seaside town - a one-armed Liverpudlian. Seeking to rebuild his life, if not his body, he is attempting to lead a life here unlike any he's lived before: a normal one - shopping, gardening, signing on, visiting friends, all the usual diurnal activities. 
 
Over a hundred miles to the north, however, two men in shellsuits are leaving Liverpool, heading south in a rickety old car. They have been sent by their gang-boss to wreak terrible, violent revenge, but have only a rough idea of their quarry: a one-armed man, maybe living somewhere in west Wales, in a small town by the sea.

A Great Big Shining Star

‘A Great Big Shining Star feels like one of the most culturally important novels I remember reading’ Bookmunch

A satirical look at the pursuit of celebrity

Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966 and now lives in Wales. He has published six previous novels: Grits, Sheepshagger, Kelly + Victor, Stump, Wreckage, and Runt. The film of Kelly + Victor will be released shortly.

Sixteen-year-old Grace has dreams, and she knows how to make them come true: a little silicone and surgery here and there –nose, breasts, lips, hair, teeth, nails. 
 
 Then with the right clothes and a new tan she’ll be ready: ready to be seen, consumed and adored by millions. Grace will become a celebrity. 
 
 Someone, though, remembers her as an ordinary, pretty schoolgirl living in a rural paradise: a place of simple, natural beauty. When he sees how utterly Grace has changed, he realises how far the world has fallen since those days. The collision of their two lives, their two very different trajectories, can only end in catastrophe.

Runt

'Niall Griffiths is a literary star' - Daily Telegraph

The writing leaps off the page...it throws up something so original and striking that it takes up permanent residence in a reader's head

Runt is a bungee-jump plummet from modern sophistication into something lurking below, where fantasy takes flesh and ancient knowledge prevails

Runt deserves the hackneyed description 'tour de force' ... it demonstrates Griffiths, a gritty realist, in complete command of the dark despairing gloop that so often smothers human lives

You would have to go back to Thomas Hardy to find a British writer who evokes a landscape so completely

Evolutionary psychology meets mythology in this short, strange, savage novel... Niall Griffiths's prose enchants you

The troubled teenager's tall tale spills out in a syntax-defying stream of consciousness that is at once liltingly innocent yet seeded with profundity

Griffiths excels in exuberant and experimental portraits of marginals. He does not disappoint with this linguistically inventive portrait

As ever with Griffiths, this is bleak and violent, sometimes bitterly political stuff peppered with absurdly funny moments

[It has a] visionary simplicity and mythic sense of place

Niall Griffiths is unrivalled as the literary voice of contemporary Wales... He mixes gritty realism with myth, poetry and regular doses of bone-cracking violence

Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966 and now lives in Wales. He has published the novels: Grits, Sheepshagger, Kelly + Victor, Stump, Wreckage, and A Great Big Shining Star. The film of Kelly + Victor was released in 2012.

On leaving school a sixteen-year-old boy goes to live with his uncle on a remote Welsh hill-farm. His aunt has recently committed suicide after losing her livestock in the foot-and-mouth epidemic and his uncle has turned, once again, to the bottle. The boy is a spiritual savant: an unwitting repository of folk memory from the margins, barely educated but possessed of extraordinary insights; barely literate but able to speak a language of his own - a poetry laden with Pagan and Christian myth. 
 
He is unaware that he is gifted and unaware of what he knows. But during one of his ecstatic trances, the boy learns that he has an appointed role in the world, which he must discover for himself. During an episode of brutal and climactic violence, he does exactly that. 
 
Told through the boy's internal monologue of beauty and damage, Runt is a powerful, disturbing and moving novel that reinvigorates the language of fiction and illuminates domestic tragedy with a penetrating epic light.

Wreckage

'It is arresting, and it is terrifying, and it is thoroughly accomplished' - Sam Leith, Daily Telegraph

A powerful piece of writing...A tragicomic lament for the generations of rejects and hopefuls who fetched up in the erstwhile "muddy pool" of Liverpool

Exhilarating...It pulses with sincere and bracing anger

The rawness and vitality that have been present in Griffiths' writing... make him more than able to present this material unflinchingly and powerfully. Red in tooth and claw, Wreckage makes bleak but compelling reading

One of Britain's most talented younger writers

Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966 and now lives in Wales. He has published six novels: Grits, Sheepshagger, Kelly + Victor, Stump, Wreckage, and Runt.

Everything goes wrong from the start. The money's been stolen from the remote North Wales post office, but Darren's been over-enthusiastic with the lump hammer. The elderly sub-postmistress lies in a coma. 
 
When Darren and Alastair get back to Liverpool only to have the money stolen from them- when a consignment of pure cocaine is added to the mix, along with some seriously dangerous criminals - things really get out of hand, and stay that way until the story finally crashes to its grisly conclusion.

Kelly + Victor

'Griffiths's latest mordant masterpiece consolidates his status as one of Britain's most talented young writers' - Time Out 
 
Soon to be a major film

The range of Griffiths’s achievement is as exhilarating as the reach of his ambition

Kelly + Victor is a book breathing at the limits of experience, its protagonists martyrs to feeling in a world gone numb

With Kelly + Victor Griffiths has completed his transition into a literary voice for the 21st century

Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966 and now lives in Wales. He has published six other novels: Grits, Sheepshagger, Stump, Wreckage, Runt and A Great Big Shining Star. The film of Kelly + Victor was released to critical acclaim in 2012.

A bar in Liverpool January 2nd 200: 
VICTOR meets a girl. Some time later that night he is in her bed. This, he thinks, is the best sex he's ever had. 
KELLY meets a boy. Some time later that night he is in her bed. This, she thinks, is the best sex she's ever had. 
 
So the story of Kelly + Victor progresses, through two mirror-image narratives: a story of the growth and spiralling intensity of sexual obsession, traced to its inevitable, devastating conclusion. Set against a backdrop of urban despair, spiritual absence and a world swamped with pornography, this is a novel about yearning for union, for purity, and for magic and mystery in a world that denies them all. And it is, above everything, a love story - or all that 21st century Britain will allow of one.

Sheepshagger

'Sheepshagger is never less than compelling; the range of Griffiths's achievement is as exhilarating as the reach of his ambition' Guardian

The plotting of the novel is cunning, the performance immaculate... The management and pacing of this material are masterly... He has produced a vital, driven and necessary book

Niall Griffiths is in complete command of his material... A hymn both ancient and modern to place and to unsentimental belonging

A powerful blend of expletive-ridden dialogue and passages of beautiful prose- quite brilliant

A fabulous piece of writing... One of the new millennium's most striking novels to date

The power of Griffiths's language is astounding, steeped in the wild forces of nature that have helped make Ianto what he is, by turns lyrically beautiful and tumultuously violent

Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966 and now lives in Wales. He is the author of six novels: Grits, Sheepshagger, Kelly + Victor, Stump, Wreckage, and Runt.

Robbed of his ancestral home - a near-derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales - Ianto pledges revenge not only on the English yuppies who have turned his grandmother's cottage into a weekenders' barbecue party but on all those who have violated him and the land that is his. This latest act of colonial oppression and desecration triggers his lurid and strange imagination into unspeakable savagery - embodying our most primal fears of physical threat, a world beyond our control.

Grits

Dubbed ‘the Welsh Irvine Welsh’, Griffiths offers a brilliant, scintillating tale of 1990s drug culture and social decay in a small Welsh coastal town.

An astonishing feat -- pulsing on every page with the unmistakable brilliance, authenticity and spirit of a magnificently gifted writer.

Any fan of "Trainspotting" will find "Grits" persuasive, alarming and addictive.

In the late 1990s, a group of young drifters from various parts of Britain find themselves washed up together in a small town on the west coast of Wales, fixed between mountains and sea. Here, they both explore and attempt to overcome those yearnings and addictions which have brought them to this place: promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, petty crime, the intense and angry search for the meaning which they feel life lacks at the arse-end of this momentous century. A novel about the dispossessed and disenfranchised, about people with no further to fall, Grits is also resolutely about the spirit of the individual, and each character's story is told in their own rich, powerful dialect. Through their voices, the novel charts this chapter in their lives, presenting, with humour and rage and a deep underlying sadness, a picture of the diversity and waste that is life in Britain today.A work of power, passion and enormous originality, Grits describes - in language both mythic and demotic - ways of living that appear squalid but which aspire to the spiritual. As a novel that speaks for an under-class and a sub-culture, it stands comparison with Cain's Book and Trainspotting.

Niall Griffiths

Novel by novel, Niall Griffiths’s exploration of transgressive, desperate lives has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on in Britain today. His latest book, the deeply intelligent Broken Ghost, 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.

A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time… what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights...This important novel comes from a tradition: from the green fuse of Dylan Thomas...The result, though, is something new, a profane, passionate response to nature and to the countryside, which is rarely encountered in contemporary British fiction any more.

This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page.

Niall Griffiths has, like Kelman, crafted a sophisticated literary voice for the kind of people routinely dismissed not even as old-school proletarians but as a worthless “feral underclass”… It rewards us with soaring lyricism, the bite and drive of its vernacular voices, and the recurrent search for “something transcendent” in natural beauty, in human love, in the rapture of consciousness itself, in the ancient rhythms and cycles of the land.

Pairing Irvine Welsh’s demotic vim with the conspiratorial frisson of a David Peace novel, Broken Ghost is strange and compelling.

Griffiths’s novel poses some fascinating questions…[Broken Ghost’s] exploration of the unfulfilled dreams of an underclass of drug addicts and single mothers is intelligent and challenging.

Griffiths submerges the reader in a prosaic world of benefit investigations, bare-knuckle boxing, and watching Jeremy Kyle with Diamond White cider… Griffiths’s novel is an unusual mix of political and mystical, lifted by the possibility…of social transformation.

[Griffiths has an] astonishing ability to downshift from an unsentimental and lyrical evocation of the natural world to the seamy and sordid rendering of the basest of human interaction… Broken Ghost is about what seeps out at the periphery when the centre is rotten.

In Broken Ghost he [Griffiths] has produced what will surely turn out to be one of the most important and engaging novels in post-Brexit British literature.

Broken Ghost succeeds through its unflinching approach. It is a tempestuous journey of recovery and decay all the way up to the despotism of its harrowing finish which serves as a wrenching reminder that the prelude of the dystopian tomorrow is today.

[Broken Ghosts] revels in the unpleasant truth of how profane people really are… thoroughly political… Griffiths wants the reader to feel ostracized from the characters to the same extent that the characters feel ostracized from wider society.

A glittering and ferocious portrait of our time… wonderfully angry, funny, involving … Broken Ghost by Niall Griffiths…is a bitter and sparkling masterpiece.

Broken Ghost is a bleak, uplifting, angry, magical, heartbreaking book in which people keep on trying to be the best they can be despite a world designed to provoke them otherwise. Griffiths' brilliant novel is by some distance my fiction highlight of 2019.

[Broken Ghost is] brim-full of such lovely stuff, though all leavened by an almost biblical anger at the ruptured, fractured state of things, Griffiths balancing such opposing forces in a writing style muscular enough to wrestle you to the ground and leave you panting.

**WINNER OF THE 2020 WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD** 
 
'A magnificently gifted writer' Irvine Welsh 
 
A Welsh community witnesses a strange vision: the huge spectre of a woman floating over a ridge. Is it a collective hallucination, a meteorological phenomenon, or something supernatural? The individuals living in these mountains are already battling their own demons - of drink, drugs, domestic violence, depression - how could an apparition unite these crushed people or their fragmented country? 
 
This is a novel that gives voices to the marginalised, the dispossessed, the forgotten. 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. Disturbing and unforgettable, darkly funny and deeply moving, it is written in a charged language that is vernacular, lyrical and hieratic all at once. Broken Ghost is 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' New Statesman, Books of the Year 
 
'Griffiths has forged a chimerical piece of radical fiction, a Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time.' Guardian 
 
'This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page.' Daily Mail

Niall Griffiths

Praise for Broken Ghost

Novel by novel, Niall Griffiths’s exploration of transgressive, desperate lives has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on in Britain today. His latest book, the deeply in ...

A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time… **what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights**...This important novel comes from ...

This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page.

Novel by novel, Niall Griffiths’s exploration of transgressive, desperate lives has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on in Britain today. His latest book, the deeply in ...

A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time… **what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights**...This important novel comes from ...

This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page.

Novel by novel, Niall Griffiths’s exploration of transgressive, desperate lives has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on in Britain today. His latest book, the deeply in ...

A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time… **what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights**...This important novel comes from ...

This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page.

Books by Niall Griffiths

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Praise for Broken Ghost

Novel by novel, Niall Griffiths’s exploration of transgressive, desperate lives has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on in Britain today. His latest book, the deeply in ...

A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time… what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights...This important novel comes from ...

This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page.

Novel by novel, Niall Griffiths’s exploration of transgressive, desperate lives has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on in Britain today. His latest book, the deeply in ...

A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time… what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights...This important novel comes from ...

This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page.

Novel by novel, Niall Griffiths’s exploration of transgressive, desperate lives has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on in Britain today. His latest book, the deeply in ...

A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time… what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights...This important novel comes from ...

This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page.

Books by Niall Griffiths

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter

A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time… **what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights**...This important novel comes from ...

A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time… **what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights**...This important novel comes from ...

A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time… **what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights**...This important novel comes from ...