“What are the best books about or featuring Wales?” We looked at 203 of the top Welsch books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

The top 29 books, all on 2 or more “Best Welsh” book lists by how many times they appear. The remaining 150+ books, as well as the lists we used to create the list are in alphabetical order at the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

Top 29 Wales Books

29 .) Aberystwyth Mon Amour (Aberystwyth Noir, #1) by Malcolm Pryce

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

Schoolboys are being murdered all over Aberystwyth and nobody knows why. Louie Knight, the town’s private investigator, soon realises that finding out what is happening to the boys is not going to be easy.

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28 .) Among Others by Jo Walton

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

“Startling, unusual, and irresistibly readable, Among Others is at once the compelling story of a young woman struggling to escape a troubled childhood, a brilliant diary of first encounters with the great novels of modern fantasy and science fiction, and a spellbinding tale of escape from ancient enchantment.

As a child growing up in Wales, Morwenna played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. When her half-mad mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled—and her twin sister dead.”

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27 .) Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

When the Second World War air raids threaten their safety in the city, Carrie and her brother Nick are evacuated to a small Welsh village. But the countryside has dangers and adventures of its own – and a group of characters who will change Carrie’s life forever. There’s mean Mr Evans, who won’t let the children eat meat; but there’s also kind Auntie Lou. There’s brilliant young Albert Sandwich, another evacuee, and Mr Johnny, who speaks a language all of his own. Then there’s Hepzibah Green, the witch at Druid’s Grove who makes perfect mince pies, and the ancient skull with its terrifying curse…For adults and young people aged eight and over.

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26 .) From Aberystwyth with Love (Aberystwyth Noir, #5) by Malcolm Pryce

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• News From Nowhere

Private detective Louie Knight had heard the stories, he’d heard about the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine by some crazy 19th-century Czar. But he didn’t believe it. But all that changed when the museum curator of the fabled Shangri-la turned up in his office with a crazy tale of love, death, madness and betrayal.

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25 .) Here be Dragons (Welsh Princes, #1) by Sharon Kay Penman

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

Thirteenth-century Wales is a divided country, ever at the mercy of England’s ruthless, power-hungry King John. Llewelyn, Prince of North Wales, secures an uneasy truce by marrying the English king’s beloved illegitimate daughter, Joanna, who slowly grows to love her charismatic and courageous husband. But as John’s attentions turn again and again to subduing Wales—and Llewelyn—Joanna must decide where her love and loyalties truly lie.

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24 .) Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. And a strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children who once lived here – one of whom was his own grandfather – were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a desolate island for good reason. And somehow – impossible though it seems – they may still be alive. A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows.

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23 .) Not Quite White by Simon Thirsk

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• News From Nowhere

The young Jon Bull is sent by Westminster to Wales’s last remaining Welsh-speaking town to see why all attempts to bring it into the twenty-first century have failed. Waiting for him is the beautiful but embittered Gwalia…Not Quite White explores the complex tensions that spit and seethe when English colonialism and Welsh nationalism go head to head. It is a passionate defence of cultural and political identity, and a considered plea for tolerance. It is also a sustained attack on the forces of small-town bigotry and corruption. But, above all, it is an acknowledgement of the subtleties and ambiguities that exist in even the most entrenched attitudes.

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22 .) On The Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• The Guardian 2

Lewis and Benjamin Jones, identical twins, were born with the century on a farm on the English-Welsh border. For eighty years they live on the farm–sharing the same clothes, tilling the same soil, sleeping in the same bed. Their lives and the lives of their neighbors–farmers, drovers, clergymen, traders, coffin-makers–are only obliquely touched by the chaos of twentieth-century progress. Nevertheless, the twins’ world–a few square miles of countryside–is rich in the oddities, the wonders, and the tragedies of the human experience. In this extraordinary novel, Bruce Chatwin has captured every nuance of the Welsh landscape and of the lives and souls of the people who live there.

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21 .) One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard (trans Philip Mitchell)

Lists It Appears On:

• The Guardian
• The Guardian 2

“This outstanding novel tells of one boy’s journey into the grown-up world. By the light of a full moon our narrator and his friends Huw and Moi witness a side to their Welsh village life that they had no idea existed, and their innocence is exchanged for the shocking reality of the adult world.

One Moonlit Night is one of Britain’s most significant and brilliant pieces of fiction, a lost contemporary classic that deserves rediscovery.”

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20 .) People of the Black Mountains by Raymond Williams

Lists It Appears On:

• Wikipedia 1
• Wikipedia 2

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19 .) Rape of the Fair Country by Alexander Cordell

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

Set in the grim valleys of the Welsh iron country, this novel begins the saga of the Mortymer family – a family of hard men and beautiful women, all forced into a bitter struggle with their harsh environment, as they slave and starve for the cruel English ironmasters.

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18 .) Rhondda Roundabout by Jack Jones

Lists It Appears On:

• Wikipedia 1
• Wikipedia 2

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17 .) Running for the Hills: Growing Up on My Mother’s Sheep Farm in Wales by Horatio Clare

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• The Guardian 2

Before Horatio Clare was born, his parents fell in love with a place — a remote sheep farm in Wales, physically and in every other way far from the lives they were forging as young professionals in London. The farm was high up a mountain, nearly impassable in winter. The neighbors were surly, or perhaps just unused to foreigners. But the setting was breathtaking, and soon it changed Jenny’s and Robert’s lives. What began as the somewhat conventional dream of a young, ambitious couple from London looking for a weekend home quickly became a different vision. Horatio’s mother, romantic and tenacious, found it impossible to leave the fierce and beautiful land. She abandoned her job, her social world, and eventually her marriage to raise her two sons in the company of a herd of sheep, a few dogs, and the badgers, foxes, and mice who had prior claim to her new world. While other boys were going to films and listening to rock music, Horatio was weaning ewes and watching weather and surviving the furor of irascible neighbors. His childhood was marked by wonder and joy, and it is that wonderment that he bestows upon the reader as he recounts the story of the ancient, sometimes brutal, way of life on a hill farm. This wise book is a moving tribute to his mother, both beautiful and brave.

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16 .) Song of the Earth by Alexander Cordell

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

“Mostyn Evan and his family, miners turned bargees, wage a glorious
but hopeless struggle against rapacious coalmasters, Irish navvies,
the ravages of cholera, and the bullying illegal Unions.

As they ply their trade between the furnaces of Cyfarthfa and the lush
beauty of the Neath Valley, they pray and fight, sing and love, and face
each obstacle undaunted with all the stubbornness and exuberance
of Wales itself. “

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15 .) Submarine by Joe Dunthorne

Lists It Appears On:

• Irish Times
• The Culture Trip

At once a self-styled social scientist, a spy in the baffling adult world, and a budding, hormone-driven emotional explorer, Oliver Tate is stealthily nosing his way forward through the murky and uniquely perilous waters of adolescence. His objectives? Uncovering the secrets behind his parents’ teetering marriage, unraveling the mystery that is his alluring and equally quirky classmate Jordana Bevan, and understanding where he fits in among the mystifying beings in his orbit. Struggling to buoy his parents’ wedded bliss, deep-six his own virginity, and sound the depths of heartache, happiness, and the business of being human, what’s a lad to do? Poised precariously on the cusp of innocence and experience, Oliver Tate aims to damn the torpedoes and take the plunge.

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14 .) The Dig by Cynan Jones

Lists It Appears On:

• Irish Times
• News From Nowhere

Built of the interlocking fates of a badger-baiter and a farmer struggling through lambing season, The Dig unfolds in a stark rural setting where man, animal, and land are at loggerheads. There is no bucolic pastoral here: this is pure, pared-down rural realism, crackling with compressed energy, from a writer of uncommon gifts.

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13 .) The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• News From Nowhere

A twelve-year-old free spirit believes her talents will allow her to discover the answers to the disappearance of her neighbor’s patriarch.

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12 .) The Grey King by Susan Cooper

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

There is a Welsh legend about a harp of gold, hidden within a certain hill, that will be found by a boy and a white dog with silver eyes — a dog that can see the wind. Will Stanton knew nothing of this when he came to Wales to recover from a severe illness. But when he met Bran, a strange boy who owned a white dog, he began to remember. For Will is the last-born of the Old Ones, immortals dedicated to saving the world from the forces of evil, the Dark. And it is Will’s task to wake-with the golden harp — the six who must be roused from their long slumber in the Welsh hills to prepare for the last battle between the Dark and the Light.

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11 .) The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

Generally by now thought to be Machen’s greatest work, the novel, published in 1907, recounts the life of a young man, Lucian Taylor, focusing on his dreamy childhood in rural Wales, in a town based on Caerleon. “The Hill of Dreams” of the title is an old Roman fort where Lucian has strange sensual visions, including ones of the town in the time of Roman Britain. Later it describes Lucian’s attempts to make a living as an author in London, enduring poverty and suffering in the pursuit of art.

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10 .) The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably.

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9 .) The Summer of the Danes (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, #18) by Ellis Peters

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

“In the summer of 1144, a strange calm has settled over England. The armies of King Stephen and the Empress Maud, the two royal cousins contending for the throne, have temporarily exhausted each other. On the whole, Brother Cadfael considers peace a blessing. Still, a little excitement never comes amiss to a former soldier, and Cadfael is delighted to accompany a friend on a mission of diplomacy to his native Wales.

But shortly after their arrival, the two monks are caught up in another royal feud. The Welsh prince Owain Gwynedd has banished his brother Cadwaladr, accusing him of the treacherous murder of an ally. The reckless Cadwaladr has retaliated by landing an army of Danish mercenaries, poised to invade Wales. As the two armies teeter on the brink of bloody civil war, Cadfael is captured by the Danes and must navigate the brotherly quarrel that threatens to plunge an entire kingdom into chaos.”

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8 .) The Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 2

Robert Godwin’s tumultuous ride on the Wheel of Fortune begins with his passion for his sensual cousin Ginevra, as they waltz to “The Blue Danube” beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon, his beloved family home in Wales. As Robert discovers, his rational, well-ordered mind will be forever altered by his obsession for Ginevra, and his destiny will be forever linked to Oxmoon by the skeletons that lurk in the family closet.

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7 .) Until Our Blood is Dry by Kit Habianic

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• News From Nowhere

Trouble is brewing in Ystrad. It is time to defend jobs, the pits, and a way of life that has formed both the life of valley and the nation. The union is squaring up to the Coal Board, the government, and the country. Gwyn Pritchard, overman at Blackthorn colliery, believes that the way to save his pit is to keep his men working and production high. His men disagree and when an old collier dies on Gwyn’s shift, the men’s simmering resentment spills over into open defiance. But Gwyn faces a challenge at home too. His daughter Helen is in love with a fiery young collier, Scrapper Jones. In March 1984, when miners across the country walk out to join what will become a year-long strike, Scrapper throws himself into the struggle and Helen joins the women, preparing food for the soup kitchen and standing with the men on the picket line. Scrapper, Helen, and Gwyn must decide which side they are on as the dispute drives the Pritchard family apart and the Jones family to ruin. What matters most—to be right, to be loved or to belong?

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6 .) Wild Abandon by Joe Dunthorne

Lists It Appears On:

• The Culture Trip
• The Guardian 2

“At a once vibrant communal-living property in the British countryside, back-to-basics fervor has given way to a vague discontent. A place that once buzzed with activity, from the polytunnels to the pottery shed, now functions with a skeleton crew. Founder Don Riley surveys his domain with the grim focus of someone who knows what’s best for everyone—and isn’t afraid to let them know. Especially when those people are related to him.

Don’s wife, Freya, can’t quite decide whether not liking someone anymore is enough reason to end a twenty-year marriage. So she decamps to a mud yurt in the woods to mull it over. Their seventeen-year-old daughter, Kate, enrolls in school for the first time in her life: the exotic new world of fellow teenagers and surprisingly tasty cafeteria food beckons, and she is quickly lured into the arms of a “meathead” classmate. In his sister’s absence, eleven-year-old Albert falls under the spell of an outlandish new visitor to the community who fills his head with strange notions of the impending end of the world. “

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5 .) Wild Wales by George Borrow

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 1

Wales is a country interesting in many respects, and deserving of more attention than it has hitherto met with. Though not very extensive, it is one of the most picturesque countries in the world, a country in which Nature displays herself in her wildest, boldest, and occasionally loveliest forms. The inhabitants, who speak an ancient and peculiar language, do not call this region Wales, nor themselves Welsh. They call themselves Cymry or Cumry, and their country Cymru, or the land of the Cumry. Wales or Wallia, however, is the true, proper, and without doubt original name, as it relates not to any particular race, which at present inhabits it, or may have sojourned in it at any long bygone period, but to the country itself.

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4 .) The Owl Service by Alan Garner

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• The Guardian 2
• Wikipedia 2

“It all begins with the scratching in the ceiling. From the moment Alison discovers the dinner service in the attic, with its curious pattern of floral owls, a chain of events is set in progress that is to effect everybody’s lives.

Relentlessly, Alison, her step-brother Roger and Welsh boy Gwyn are drawn into the replay of a tragic Welsh legend – a modern drama played out against a background of ancient jealousies. As the tension mounts, it becomes apparent that only by accepting and facing the situation can it be resolved.”

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3 .) Resistance by Owen Sheers

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• News From Nowhere
• The Culture Trip

In a remote and rugged Welsh valley in 1944, in the wake of a German invasion, all the men have disappeared overnight, apparently to join the underground resistance. Their abandoned wives, a tiny group of farm women, are soon trapped in the valley by an unusually harsh winter—along with a handful of war-weary German soldiers on a secret mission. The need to survive drives the soldiers and the women into uneasy relationships that test both their personal and national loyalties. But when the snow finally melts, bringing them back into contact with the war that has been raging beyond their mountains, they must face the dramatic consequences of their choices.

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2 .) How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia 1
• Wikipedia 2

How Green Was My Valley is Richard Llewellyn’s bestselling — and timeless — classic and the basis of a beloved film. As Huw Morgan is about to leave home forever, he reminisces about the golden days of his youth when South Wales still prospered, when coal dust had not yet blackened the valley. Drawn simply and lovingly, with a crisp Welsh humor, Llewellyn’s characters fight, love, laugh and cry, creating an indelible portrait of a people.

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1 .) Collected Poems by RS Thomas

Lists It Appears On:

• The Culture Trip
• The Guardian
• The Guardian 2

This collection of R.S. Thomas’s poems have been published to mark his 80th birthday. Many of his themes are prophetic to all our concerns; his attack on technology and our use of it to destroy the natural world; his passionate concern for all who suffer from the greed of others; the search for personal and national identity and for meaning in human life; the quest for and dialogue with a God now absent, now present.

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The 150+ Additional Welsh Books

9 Best Wales Book Sources/Lists