An Observer Best Debut 2025 from a new voice in Welsh literature: an atmospheric and poignant story of a relationship between two small-town Valleys men during the late 1980s.

When two quiet men form a tentative connection neither knows where it might lead. M has inherited his family's ironmongery business and B is younger by eleven years and can see no future in the place where he has grown up, but when M offers him a job and lodgings, he accepts. As the two men work side by side in the shop, they also begin a life together in their one shared room above - the kind of life they never imagined possible and that risks everything if their public performance were to slip. Unfolding in South Wales against the backdrop of Section 28, the age of consent debate and the HIV and AIDS crisis, this is a tender and resonant love story, and a powerful debut.

"[Will] snap your heart strings. A bittersweet, spare, poetic novella" - Books and Bits

"Finding a distinctive voice that stands out and speaks clearly is an essential test for a novelist, and it's one that Welsh artist and writer Anthony Shapland effortlessly passes in his impressive debut... Memorable, striking, dark, beautiful and one of the best debuts I've read in years" - Observer

"A tender Welsh romance... Anthony Shapland's tender, short novel dwells as much on the beauty of the surrounding landscape as the emerging relationship it shelters. Delicately told with not a word wasted" - Financial Times

"Packs a considerable punch... With its poignant rendering of a loving relationship undertaken against great odds, compounded by a hostile political climate, A Room Above a Shop is a powerful and luminously pure novel. At 53, Shapland has arrived with his talent fully formed" - Guardian

"Written in short, lyrical, mosaic-like paragraphs, this is a beautifully crafted love story that lingers long in the memory" - The Times

"Anthony's writing is unique, sparse and poetic - a true art in itself - and this is not to be missed" - Buzz magazine

"[An] utterly unique experience... this book is a success... This is a book of deep importance to Wales' hidden histories" - Nation.Cymru

"Shapland writes with a sense of the poetic... It takes a talented writer to create something memorable in 20,000 words... potent" - Irish Times

"A vital new voice in Welsh literature" - BBC Radio Wales Arts Show