The Dark Trilogy

A book that follows one man’s life might be an autobiography, but what is a book that traces the lives of two men?

The autobiography which makes up the longest book of the trilogy holds the two histories of one man displaced by several hundred years, histories which interweave and come together in the Welsh mountains in the present day. And a part of one of those lives is traced further in the play for voices which makes up the second volume. Book three brings our characters to a resolution of kinds.

Chris Armstrong has blended fact and fiction to create a complex story with many strands... a story of the sea, a story of passionate love, a story about a writer and poet, a story about his friend and editor, and a story about the past: a past that the writer only understands completely at the very end of his anabasis – his journey away from the sea.

Sailor and librarian, navigator and researcher, teacher and trainer, and—always—a traveller: Chris Armstrong has had three careers, working as a merchant seaman, a farmhand on the farm where he still lives, and as an information scientist before retiring to become a poet and writer. He has one collection of poems in print, Mostly Welsh (Y Lolfa, 2019). Although initially entirely focussed on poetry, his writing has branched into short stories and works of fiction including this volume, The Dark Trilogy. He has published elsewhere: in Storgy, Agenda and London Grip New Poetry for example. Although born in Sussex, he has lived in a cottage in the mountains of Mid Wales most of his life.