Welsh fiction · literary suspense · speculative worlds
Stories about memory, place, systems — and the people who refuse to disappear inside them.
The Names That We Keep is a contemporary investigative suspense novel with a dark speculative edge, set against the retail parks, industrial estates and quiet institutional spaces of South Wales.
When Carys Matthias begins asking questions about what happens after a cremation service ends, she is drawn into a system that has learned how to reduce grief to process — and people to useful material.
Two Swanseas occupy the same ground. One remembers what the other erased. Housing officer Siân Picton follows a disputed address into a city where boundaries are records, promises and weapons.
“A name is not a filing error.”From the world of The Names That We Keep
About the author
Edward Johns is a Welsh writer based in South Wales. His fiction combines contemporary suspense, speculative ideas and character-led mystery, with recurring themes of memory, identity, care, institutional power and the human stories hidden inside systems.
His debut novel, The Names That We Keep, is rooted in Swansea, where Edward is also a frontline worker in emergency ambulance services. He is currently developing Hafn Lane, the first book in The Cities of Salt and Rain.
The manuscript is moving through final chapter work before a full structural trim and editorial pass.
Read updateMusic for memory, rain, late-night roads and the quiet machinery beneath the story.
Read updateA real Swansea, another Swansea, and the disputed places where both insist they are true.
Read update