I write stories where the past still breathes.

My novels weave real history with imagined life and what it felt like to live it.

I inhabit my character’s world, seeing what they saw and feeling what they felt.

This is The Human Thread.

The connections that carry memory and experience across time, and the sense that lives once lived still echo in the world we inhabit today.

Fiction and ideas shaped by history, memory, and the human mind.

Unseen Souls by John E. Rees

Set in industrial Dowlais, the story of how Eliza Turner finds a way beyond poverty and heartbreak through art.

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Cover of the book titled 'The Silence of the White Shadow: A Casebook of Owain Morgan Mystery' by John E. Rees, featuring a foggy castle silhouette.

Christmas, 1896. A manuscript unsettles history, drawing Owain Morgan into a case of motive and silence.

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An imagined university in Bangor, and the intellectual world that formed Owain Morgan.

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Notes on the history and ideas behind the stories.

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Thought, Silence, and Meaning
Thought, Silence, and Meaning

William James stream of thought, and how meaning emerges in what lies behind words.

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The Sound of the Furnace
The Sound of the Furnace

A working day in nineteenth-century Dowlais that shapes the world of Unseen Souls.

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The Weight of a Word
The Weight of a Word

How a phrase could alter history - the linguistic tensions behind The Silence of the White Shadow.

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Dolwyddelan Castle
Dolwyddelan Castle

The castle and its real and imagined history in The Silence of the White Shadow.

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The Making of Dowlais
The Making of Dowlais

How a quiet upland community was transformed by Industrialisation.

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William Blake’s Inner World
William Blake’s Inner World

How Blake influenced the thinking of Professor Owain Morgan.

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