A new novel by an award-winning writer from Ceredigion subverts the norms of dystopian fiction, bringing us a post-apocalyptic tale focusing on a very ordinary woman’s search for meaning in a world which is entirely altered.

‘The Significance of Swans’ (Y Lolfa) also looks at the importance of memory, when memory is all that’s left.

Author Rhiannon Lewis who is originally from Cardigan was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Fiction prize in 2022 for her previous book, ‘I Am the Mask Maker and other stories’. In her new novel, set just a few years into the future, the planet is thrown into turmoil when people start disappearing in their sleep.

Rhiannon said: “Men are too often the protagonists in dystopian novels. I wanted a woman – someone who has been a wife and mother – as the main character, in order to challenge assumptions about the kind of people that survive catastrophic events, and to see events from a different viewpoint.”

Where in many post-apocalyptic thrillers a small group will band together to survive, empty-nester Aeronwy seems to be the only one person left behind by the mysterious ‘removals’. She focuses on surviving until, driven by the human need to connect, she decides to trek over 100 miles to the west Wales coast in the hope that her brother may still be at their family farm. However, she soon realises that her biggest challenge won’t be finding food and staying warm, but in fact not being alone…

Rhiannon’s work has been lauded by the literary world. As well as the Wales Book of the Year shortlisting, her short story Piano Solo won the 2020 William Faulkner Short Story Contest, and an early version of ‘The Significance of Swans’ was shortlisted for the Bristol Prize in 2018 and came runner-up in the 2019 New Welsh Writing Awards. It was hailed by the chair of judges of the Bristol Prize, as “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, written with a woman’s sensitivity and interiority.”

‘The Significance of Swans’ by Rhiannon Lewis (£8.99, Y Lolfa) is available now.