Old Johnny Ifor had never gone anywhere. Not physically, anyway. But in his mind; in the journals he’s inherited; in the stories he starts to tell to Jonathon, he travels across oceans and generations.

Jonathon had moved from city to city as a child, dragged in the wake of a father who always thought the next place must be better than all the “shit-holes” the family had just left behind. His best years had been lost sleeping rough on tropical beaches and cleaning toilets on the backpack trail. As he sits in a darkening cottage watching what’s left of his youth and sanity dribbling through the hourglass, Old Johnny’s stories bind him tighter to a north Wales island winter.

Exploring the nature of obsession and entrapment, Send My Cold Bones Home is fortified by a strong dose of the macabre. But it also displays Tristan Hughes’ fascination with haunting, and - with more than a sinister nod to the ghost story - it probes the absences of fathers and mothers, and the art of getting away.

Praise for Tristan Hughes’ THE TOWER:

The reach… is ambitious; his examination of the dispossessed intersects with a critique of the late capitalist desire for dominion over the material world. – Times Literary Supplement