Neon Roses

By: Rachel Dawson

Narrated by: Ffion Aynsley

A coming-of-age novel about two women falling in love during the culturally and politically turbulent 1980s.

It's 1984 in The Valleys, South Wales, and Eluned Hughes is stuck. The miners' strikes are ravaging her family and community, and her boyfriend of six years, Lloyd, is starting to bring up marriage more than she would like. She spends her days selling shoes, listening to Madonna, and trying to hold it all together. Meanwhile, Eluned's clever and precocious little sister, Mabli, thinks she knows it all. Mabli takes her older, moneyed, Thatcherite, policeman boyfriend, Graham, as the ticket out of her working class reality.

So, Eluned is left contemplating her own destiny—staying at home with a husband and a couple of kids—until one day she hears about a fundraising group called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Apparently they're from London, they've been raising money for the miners in her town, and they're coming to visit. She's curious, for sure. And even more so when she lays eyes on June for the first time. She has short hair, she wears leather jackets, she's moody—and Eluned's life is turned upside down.

Neon Roses takes us on a ride of all the glorious sights and sounds of the 1980s, as Eluned attempts to carve her identity out of the protests, Pride parades, nightclubs and parties of Cardiff, London and Manchester. But this is also a story about two sisters, and the different paths they take outside of where they come from. What is the reality of reconciling family with queerness? What does a family even look like? What choice should Eluned make when her little sister rings her up out of the blue one night, confessing the truth about her relationship with Graham?

©2023 Rachel Dawson (P)2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critic reviews

Neon Roses is a big-hearted story about finding your feet and following your heart, set against a beautifully-realised backdrop of 1980s British life. Tender, sexy, uplifting and fun. (SARAH WATERS)

A bold coming of age story that's joyfully queer, filthy and fun! Neon Roses transports the reader back to the passion and the protests of 1980s, in a voice that is fresh and proudly Welsh (CHLOE TIMMS)

Pitch-perfect in its vivid immersion in an Elnett-scented, fuck-Thatcher-yelling 80s sensorium, Neon Roses is bursting with the pride and DIY fashion genius with which small-town fierce femme Eluned stitches together her queer community. A hug and a snog of a book, stick it in your pocket to flag that you're here for queer love (SO MAYER)