The Naming

Contemporary Gothic novel inspired by the Welsh myth of Angelystor

In the village church, beneath a 600-year-old yew, names have started to appear, carved deep into the mossy wall. Real people’s names that never carry an explanation, but always come with a consequence.

Journalist Elin Morgan returns to her childhood home in South Wales to bury her father and outrun everything else: the silence between her and her mother, the memory of a girl she couldn’t stop loving and a feeling that she’s more than a little bit lost. But the village she finds is not the one she left. Something has been stirred. The dead are being spoken for and the living are growing restless.

Some think it’s prophecy, while others think it’s punishment. But Elin, a self-confessed sceptic, can’t help watching the wall and the strange spirals that accompany the names. Because once your name appears there, it isn’t death you start fearing. It’s all the choices you’ve avoided until now.

Inspired by the myth of Angelystor, the Dark Angel of Wales, The Naming is a novel about grief and superstition, desire and damage, and the thin line between myth and what we make of it. In a village where the walls are talking, someone – or something – is keeping count.