INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SHOWCASE
# 14. HONNO PRESS
This week we welcome to the Independent Publishing Showcase a publisher based in Aberystwyth, and was formed in 1986 by group of women from Cardiff who got together and formed a small independent publishing company. Look closely at the logo for Honno Press and you will see a little owl and this appeared on the very first logo for the Honno Press and still remains to this very day. On the 1st March 1987 Honno Press released its very first two books, one in Welsh and one in English but both about two very inspirational Welsh women.
‘Honno’ is a Welsh word that means ‘That one (feminine) who is elsewhere’
Have a look at their website and there is just so much to see and read, from books released over recent years to books coming out in 2021 and also a blog you can buy direct from the publisher.
They have a very exciting listing of books in both fiction and poetry, these can be ordered by visiting their website with details below.
Keep an eye on their Twitter feed @or visit their website: Honno Press
You can also find them on You Tube by searching for Honno Press.
A selection of the fiction titles currently released and due for release:
Advent by Jane Fraser
Published: 21st January 2021
Summary:
Winter, 1904, and feisty twenty-one-year old Ellen has been summoned back from her new life in Hoboken, New Jersey, to the family farm on windswept Gower, in a last bid to prevent the impending death of her alcoholic father.
On her return, she finds the family in disarray. Ailing William is gambling away large swathes of Thomas land; frustrated Eleanor is mourning the husband she once knew; and Ellen s younger twin brothers face difficult choices.
Ellen, tasked with putting her family s lives in order, finds herself battling one impossible decision after another. Resourceful, passionate, and forthright, can she remain in Gower, where being female still brings with it so many limitations? Can she endure being so close to her lost love? Will she choose home and duty, or excitement and opportunity across the Atlantic?
Cambrian Pictures by Ann Julia Hatton
Published: 25th February 2021
Summary:
When the Welsh heroine, Rosa Percival, resists her father’s plan to sell her to an English lord like a piece of property, her uncle praises her as ‘a bit of Cambrian blood, pure and honest, neither ashamed nor afraid to refuse the gingerbread gilding of a title’.
Weaving together themes of gender, liberty, power and transgression, Ann Julia Hatton’s Cambrian Pictures; or, Every One Has Errors (1810) is a comedy of manners and morals with serious intent. Notable for its inverse seduction plots, Cambrian Pictures is a witty and colourful courtship novel with a lively cast of characters: a cross-dressing Welsh girl duels with an unwelcome suitor, an ageing English aristocrat kidnaps the much-younger object of her lust. Mainly located in contemporary north Wales, Hatton explores idealised Welsh contexts in opposition to English-set metropolitan corruption. Featuring lyrical passages of description and sharply-observed domestic scenes, Cambrian Pictures is also stylistically interesting as a vehicle for poetry – in quotation and Hatton’s own. Drawing on domestic travel writing and the emergence of the Gothic, Cambrian Pictures is one of the strongest Welsh-set novels of the Romantic period.
Emmet and Me by Sara Gethin
Release Date: 20th May 2021
Summary:
Summer 1966: When her father comes home with lipstick on his collar, ten-year-old Claire’s life is turned upside down. Her furious mother leaves the family and heads to London, and Claire and her brothers are packed off to Ireland, to their reclusive grandmother at her tiny cottage on the beautifully bleak coast of Connemara. A misfit among her new classmates, Claire finds it hard to make friends until she happens across a boy her own age from the school next door. He lives at the local orphanage, a notoriously harsh place. Amidst half-truths, lies and haunting family secrets, Claire forms a forbidden friendship with Emmet – a bond that will change both their lives forever.
The Covenant by Thorne Moore
Release Date: 20th August 2020
Summary:
Leah is tied to home and hearth by debts of love and duty – duty to her father, turned religious zealot after the tragic death of his eldest son, Tom; love for her wastrel younger brother Frank’s two motherless children. One of them will escape, the other will be doomed to follow in their grandfather’s footsteps.
At the close of the 19th century, Cwmderwen’s twenty-four acres, one rood and eight perches are hard won, the holding run down over the years by debt and poor harvest. But they are all the Owens have and their rent is always paid on time. With Tom’s death a crack is opened up and into this chink in the fabric of the family step Jacob John and his wayward son Eli, always on the lookout for an opportunity.
Wild Spinning Girls by Carol Lovekin
Release Date: 20th February 2020
Summary:
Ida Llewellyn loses her job and her parents in the space of a few weeks and, thrown completely off course, she sets off to Wales to the house her father has left her. But Heather, the young woman still in her teens whose home it was, keeps the house as a shrine to her late mother and is determined to scare Ida away. The two girls battle with suspicion and fear before discovering that the secrets harboured by their thoughtless parents have grown rotten with time, and that any ghosts Ty’r Cwmwl harbours are of their own making. Their broken hearts will only mend once they cast off the house and its history, and let go of the keepsakes that they treasure like childhood dreams.
For further information on the publications from please visit their website: Honno Press
You can also find them on Twitter: @honno and also their Instagram feed @gwasghonnopress
If you have enjoyed this week’s showcase, please look out for my next Independent Publishers Showcase next week. If you are an indie publisher and would like to add your name to the showcase, you can contact me via Twitter: @TheLastWord1962
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