List Of Writers

KEIL, CHRIS

Website: www.chriskeil.eu
Email: chris.keil@btopenworld.com, or contact him via his publisher Alcemi at gwen@ylolfa.com  

Chris Keil is an accomplished linguist and ran an upland sheep farm for around twenty years. He has worked as a Brixton schoolteacher and a teacher of English as a foreign language in a number of European countries. He has specialised, vocationally, in marketing Welsh lamb in Europe, and academically, in collective memory and representations of the Holocaust. He lectures worldwide and has published on dissonant heritage and traumatic memory at Auschwitz. He lives in Carmarthenshire, west Wales, and currently lectures at Trinity College, Carmarthen, as well as acting as a tour guide in major European cities. Chris has written two novels to date.

Reviews:

"…Quietly powerful… reaching to the roots of our daily life…"
TLS

"…Infused with a lyrical voice and the vocabulary of the poet…"
New Welsh Review

Selected Publications:
The French Thing (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2002)
Liminal (Alcemi, 2007)


Liminal (Alcemi, 2007)

Aled is used to his dad Geraint waxing lyrical about some saint’s clifftop lookout; some Greek temple or another hosting a thousand sacred prostitutes; some village near Corinth. Geraint is the county archaeologist, after all. So when travel agent Aled takes a recce trip to that same Peloponnese village, his father is surprised. When Aled fails to return on the eve of his marriage, Geraint becomes alarmed and sets out on his trail.

This quest, which is also a pilgrimage, will change all those involved. Relationships – father and youthful son; son and elderly mother; fiances, lovers; colleagues - none are immutable. This novel shows those thresholds of choice, those liminal moments and places where a door may open onto another world, or at the very least, another way of relating to the one we have. And everywhere, at your feet, under your hands, this fabulous texture of the marble, these beautiful, creamy, fleshlike tones and surfaces, lit by glittering highlights, like sweat, like stars, like points of love.

Here, Theseus killed the robber Sinis, stretching him between two pine trees… Briggana would have passed ruined shrines to Hermes and Aphrodite, Isis and Serapis… He pictured the layers and veils Briggana must have pushed through in her mind, through the hallucinatory uproar of the cicadas, watching her feet scuffing the dusty road: the heat, the painted shrines, the perfumed oil.

Which is actually the creepier and more sinister scenario? That he’s been led around these dark and unfamiliar streets by an American Secret Service agent, or that he’s been led around these dark and unfamiliar streets by someone who’s pretending to be an American Secret Service agent?

To purchase this title from Alcemi, please click on its front cover