Broken Ghost — Niall Griffiths

A visionary novel from the edge of the world. A Welsh community is drawn together and blown apart by a strange vision in the mountains: the huge spectre of a woman floating over a ridge. The people who live here in these mountains already have their own demons - drink, drugs, domestic violence, psychoses - but each character has a different experience of this strange apparition, a different reaction, and for some it will change everything. Is it a collective hallucination? A meteorological phenomenon? Whatever it is, they all saw something, early one morning on the shores of a mountain lake, something that will awaken in them powers and passions and, perhaps, a possibility of healing these broken people in a broken country.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. Disturbing and unforgettable, darkly funny and deeply moving, written in a charged language that is vernacular, lyrical and hieratic all at once, Broken Ghost is - simultaneously - a howl of anguish and a summoning of gods. 'Combines myth, drug culture and iconoclastic political vision in a wild music that's also a call to arms. This important book outstrips even its own virtuoso literary technique' New Statesman