How do you go about describing a book by Nicholls? The trickiest thing is to describe it without giving anything away and ruining the reading experience….here goes nothing! Condemned to Cymru is a love letter from a struggling writer with body issues, whose biggest outspoken bully is himself, possibly down to the incredibly deep rooted over powering mother and absent father issues he has which leads to him being in an abusive relationship…I therapist’s wet-dream.

Our narrator is Magnus, he has Quantum IV level acne on his face, the pimples have enough presence to get their own names, Wales has been at war with another European country and Magnus gets sent over from Iceland to carry out a anthropological study…What Magnus returns with is not the results you’d expect from said study. There are a number of absurd local stories from people in pubs and random strangers who randomly get into his car, there are little snippets of overheard conversations, definitions of town’s names, poems from the biggest name in Welsh poetry and ya know those little blue plaques you see when visiting a town in the UK? well it has them too. For me my favourite part were those trips down memory lane remembering Welsh bands of the past…used to love Catatonia. You may think that the information that Magnus is providing is irrelevant but once you start digging deeper you’ll see just how clever the book is.

I’ve read a few books by Nicholls now to know what to expect, a proper onion of a book with so many layers that you can get lost in the dialogue and forget what the actual plot of the book is, there are always those little references to things that have already happened to keep you from completely losing your way. It’s like an abstract painting, he lays everything out on the pages and leaves your own imagination to unravel the book’s mysteries. If you live in Wales, or were born in Wales or have visited Wales or are an actual Whale then ya gotta get this books to see if your town/village gets mentioned…you might want to sue.

Blog review: felcherman.wordpress.com/2022/04/23/condemned-to-cymru-by-m-j-nicholls/