I’m a writer, and a part-time university lecturer. My first novel, “The French Thing” (Carreg Gwalch, 2002), set in rural Wales against a background of animal rights protests, was a story about love defeated by competing visions of ethical and social reality.
“Liminal” (Alcemi, 2007) goes into issues of memory, truth and fiction, the interleaved worlds of objectivity and the imagination.I’m currently deeply involved in a new novel in which my characters attempt to derive the present from the past, a doomed enterprise.
“Liminal” reviews
“Under the hallucinatory brightness of the Greek sun, in a place where ancient monuments adjoin concrete hotels, Geraint sees everywhere portals to realms of history and of alternative lives… Keil’s writing, which is limpid and often arrestingly vivid, has a charged quality that conveys the mysteries pulsing behind the everyday surfaces of things.” Nicholas Clee, The Guardian
“This intelligent novel shows those liminal moments where a door may open onto another world.” John Jones, Western Mail
“A thoroughly professional story-teller… parades before us a fetching variety of entertaining characters.”
John Trethewy, Welsh Books Council
“In following Aled, each member of the search party is altered, all returning to their home soil changed; and realising that, as with Orpheus and Eurydice, the trick is not to look back.”
Planet
“There is much to admire in the novel, particularly the strength and lucidity of Keil’s prose… Keil has an eye for the sensual world, evoking it with many an original turn of phrase.”
Jonathan Carr, Athens News
“This is an enchanting novel that continues to reveal its secrets long after you have put it down.”
New Welsh Review.
“A subtle and intricate meditation on the blurry junctures separating us from the past, from each other, and finally from ourselves.”
Tristan Hughes
“I’m enthralled by Liminal – the spare, precise, resonant language, the deftness with which character and mutual response are bodied forth, the sense of human and mythic hinterland minimally and disturbingly evoked, the sheer metaphysical ambition of the novel… beautifully written, hugely resonant and accomplished.”
Jim Perrin
“Reading Liminal, a novel by Chris Keil from Welsh press Alcemi… Liminal’s central enigma is rewarding and human.”
M. John Harrison
“Hypnotic…” Jan Morris
“Chris Keil’s second novel Liminal has marked him out as a writer to watch.”
‘Meet the Author’ Library Services Event, South Wales
“The French Thing” reviews
“This lovely shadowy cast of characters… there’s a brooding sense of violence”
Jon Gower, BBC Radio Wales
“One of that new breed of novels which has modern Wales at its centre…perceptive investigation and textured style…this quietly powerful book”
Clare Morgan, Times Literary Supplement
“This immensely promising first novel, infused with a lyrical voice and the vocabulary of the poet”
Tony Padfield, New Welsh Review
“Finely crafted fictional account of a disappearing way of life”
Dean Powell, Western Mail
“A lamb auction in the town is like something out of Thomas Hardy, and the modern business side is equally well depicted.”
Ann Barr, Literary Review