We are very excited to welcome the novelist Niall Griffiths to Housmans on February 23rd to celebrate the publication of his new novel Of Talons and Teeth: an historical novel set Wales before the Industrial Revolution, as human love tries to flower amidst squalor and serfdom. Niall will be in conversation with the brilliant Gary Budden, one of the country’s finest writers of weird fiction and psychogeography (and hybrids thereof.)

Wales, a mining village, pre-industrial revolution. A world of serfdom and squalor, its inhabitants oppressed by both Chapel conformist impulses and the predations of a new kind of capitalism being born.

Sion, a metalworker, strikes up an illicit relationship with Katherine, the wife of the mineowner’s personal dogsbody. And so begins the struggle of non-transactional and non-exploitative human love to be recognised in a place bent on the destruction and negation of that very thing.

A mix of political anger, historical excavation, Celtic mysticism, praise of the human impulse to love and rage at avarice and exploitation, Of Talons and Teeth seeks to explore that moment when human beings and the natural beauties around them were turned into mere chattels; when Mammon became the only god worth worshipping.

There are free tickets available. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please contact shop@housmans.com.

If you choose book + event entry, your copy of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or have it delivered, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.