Addiction, poverty, trauma, despair, the aftermath of abuse (bodily or social): his hard-hit people face the worst that a skewed fate can chuck at them in an unforgiving society where “power and its props became valued above all”.

In a reductive nutshell, Griffiths's fiction can sound like the toughest of sells. At least, in Cape, he benefits from a loyal publisher, and a reasonably accessible backlist. Beginning with Grits in 2000, he has written eight novels that bring necessary news about the strange mutations in our psychic and social worlds via stories set on the margins of society – and, for Griffiths, on the geographical edgelands of this disunited kingdom too. '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.Born in Liverpool, long settled in his homeland of Wales, 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”. '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 '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 Broken Ghost is a howl of anguish and a summoning of gods. Disturbing and unforgettable, darkly funny and deeply moving, it is written in a charged language that is vernacular, lyrical and hieratic all at once.

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. This is a novel that gives voices to the marginalised, the dispossessed, the forgotten. 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? 'A magnificently gifted writer' Irvine WelshĪ Welsh community witnesses a strange vision: the huge spectre of a woman floating over a ridge. **WINNER OF THE 2020 WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD**

Niall griffiths broken ghost