Barefoot Summer - Michael Tod

Author Michael Tod has set this trilogy of stories in the land of Wales that he loves so dearly.

In Barefoot Summer, we follow fifteen year old David (Tigerface) Townsend when he is sent to stay with a ‘nutty aunt’ in a remote valley in South Wales whilst he recuperates from a devastating accident. Like the narrator of the story, we desperately want to believe that Tigerface spent the summer roaming the hills and swimming in a mountain pool with the beautiful Bedwen – but is his tale credible? Do the castle and its jackdaws really exist as he has described them? Why is Bedwen always barefoot?

‘Magical.’ Barbara Anne Knight.

‘Charming.’ Catherine Merriman.

The Prat on the Beach is a short but powerful story of a falling-out between a young woman and her brother, recently ordained into the priesthood. It seems at first that there are only two characters involved but many readers (and the author) would claim that there are four and possibly even five.

In a remote coastal village in medieval Wales, the King’s tax assessor and a woman he knows only as The Ferryman’s Daughter, sit up by a fire of driftwood through a long winter’s evening and far into the night. She tells him how she once stupidly helped the man she loved, Jack Ladd, steal into a castle to woo Lord Cedric’s spoilt daughter who Jack wrongly believed was in love with him. So traumatic has her life been as a result of this that she has forgotten her real name and her guest sets out to help her recall it.