The Human Thread

In January 2026 I celebrated my seventy-second birthday. After a long professional career, I now have the time to step back and reflect on the ideas I write about — how memory, experience and belief connect past and present.

I call this The Human Thread.

It runs through everything I write — my fiction, my essays and my reflections on history and human nature.

Growing up in a South Wales mining village, I know how hard and precarious life can be. Working as a labourer to support myself through university deepened that understanding.

My studies in history, economics and psychology helped me understand the forces that shape societies and individuals.

I became preoccupied with how the mind works, why people act as they do, and how belief and temperament shape decisions. That curiosity lies at the heart of my writing.

In my fiction, I inhabit the inner lives of my characters because I have experienced many of the patterns that shape them.

In my essays, I explore how ideas travel through generations and what they mean to us today.

History is often marked by great declarations, laws and charters that appear to alter the course of events. But they endure only because of how people accept, resist or reinterpret them.

Unseen Souls explores the harsh working and living conditions of the Dowlais ironworks in the mid-nineteenth century. It follows the life of Eliza Turner, who breaks free from an apparently inevitable future. Her artistic ability becomes the means of her escape. There is, inevitably, something of my own history in that story. I know those valleys intimately, through family and friends, many of whom still live there.

Another of my fictional characters is Professor Owain Morgan, a late Victorian scholar of the mind who seeks not merely to solve crimes but to understand the motives behind them. His investigations are less about guilt than about response — how fear, pride, love or insecurity shape the choices people make. I see elements of my own development in Owain. His adventures are set in North Wales, where I now live and which I know intimately.

We live in an age of noise. Political spectacle dominates. Cultural arguments flare and vanish. The temptation is either to retreat into nostalgia or to surrender to cynicism. Both are evasions.

The Human Thread demands something steadier.

It asks us to remember without romanticising.

To criticise without contempt.

To build without forgetting the cost.

In the years ahead, my aim is simple: to add my own thread carefully, honestly and with hope.

— John E. Rees, 18/02/2026