I had the pleasure to meet the author and book binder Chris Bradshaw at the Festival in the Shire and find out more from him about a book that he had been writing for twenty-five years and which he hopes will soon be published in mass market format. It is called The Green Book of Olwen Ellis and is an adventure of old fashioned imagination and mythology pitted against the corporate values of late twentieth century Britain. It paints a subversive and shifting world of chivalry and mischief, sex and duplicity and death and resurrection. Olwen Ellis is a girl with a mission. In the last house in a remote valley in North Wales she has discovered a secret journal of the old lady who lived in the house before her.

She takes her mission to protect and preserve her valley from the ravages of the modern world and the vain works of men. There are echoes of old Welsh tales in this book, poetic themes and literary conundrums; alongside the outlaws and dreamers, tycoons and celebrities, there are ghosts and fairies and comic policemen. But at the same time it is the very real Wales of late 20th Century.

Many of the chapters can still be read as self contained stories in their own right but are closely woven so as to provide a greater whole, which is at once romance, satire, adventure and dreamscape.

Chris tells that ‘the tale has come a long way from the formless vision I had when I first visited the slate quarries of Estimaner, and the tentative beginnings conceived of the Yorkshire moors a quarter of a century ago. It has perhaps come even further from the stories written in the 1990’s and was finally completed at a quarter of a million words in May 2010. It is probably the only work of literature in the country that is available hand-bound by its author, and as such is I suppose something of a new concept in art and publishing.’

It is hard bound in half-buckram 469 pages with marbled paper sides by the author and available in that form to order from him - telephone 01497 821983 or 07800 852175.