Glass Houses: 'A devastatingly compelling new voice in literary fiction' - Louise O'Neill

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'Through a dewy sheen of teen nostalgia, Reece deftly explores the weight of political events on individual lives. Her supple, visceral prose evokes North Wales in all its complexity, beautifully rendered in water, resin and sky'

Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater and Milk Teeth

'Francesca Reece is a devastatingly compelling new voice in literary fiction'

Louise O'Neill, author of Asking For It and Idol

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Somewhere, in a box in Margot Yates' attic there's a video of Gethin by the lake at Ty Gwydr. He's young - nineteen, maybe twenty. It's late spring and dusk, and a low sun leaks white light into the horizon behind the dark fringe of trees. Olwen is filming. Gethin narrows his eyes at the camera. Her bodiless voice says to him, I love it here. He says, good. This place is ours.

Forester Gethin Thomas is struggling to make ends meet in his rural hometown in North Wales. Bright, charming, but unambitious, the thing that keeps him going is Ty Gwydr, a beautiful lakeside house that he keeps an eye on for absent English owners. The house has been empty for so long he's come to think of it as his own.

That is until the owners decide to sell, sending Geth into freefall. And when he discovers that Olwen, his first love who left him and their small town for a new life in London, has returned to North Wales with her husband, Geth and Olwen will find themselves pulled back into the past and what could have been - or still could be.

But soon mysterious messages start arriving at the house, and they must question whether this is the love story they thought it was, or whether there might be something altogether more sinister lurking beneath the surface.

Reviews

A razor-sharp commentary on social class, Welsh identity, and whether we have ownership over the places we come from. Through a dewy sheen of teen nostalgia, Reece deftly explores the weight of political events on individual lives. Her supple, visceral prose evokes North Wales in all its complexity, beautifully rendered in water, resin and sky -- Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater and Milk Teeth
Glass Houses has the rare quality of handling heavy subjects with a real lightness of touch - how people shape places and how places shape people in turn, how the complexities of cultural identity are braided into the complexities of selfhood, how what we own will so often, in the final reckoning, come to own us -- Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass
It was so refreshing to read about North Wales in this way and I've never seen the Welsh language presented so naturally within the prose and dialogue - this place, these characters, this community feel so real to me. I'm glad this novel exists and I can't wait for more people to discover this often overlooked history of our country. Gorgeously luscious and atmospheric, Gethin and Olwen are two characters that perfectly encapsulate the two halves of my heart and the gentle push and pull of North Wales -- Gwenllian Ellis, author of Sgen I'm Syniad

Author Bio

Francesca Reece is a writer and translator from North Wales. Her debut novel, Voyeur, was published by Tinder Press in 2021. She was the 2019 recipient of the Desperate Literature Prize, and has had work featured in The London Magazine, Banshee, and Elle UK. After several years spent living in Paris, she is now based in London, where she is a bookseller at BookBar.