Cardigan will be taking centre stage as the setting for a new dystopian book.

The Significance of Swans, by award-winning Welsh author Rhiannon Lewis, focuses on a woman’s search for meaning in a world altered by a post-apocalyptic event.

In this female-focused dystopian thriller, the planet is thrown into chaos when people mysteriously vanish in their sleep.

The protagonist, Aeronwy, seems to be the only person left behind by these ‘removals’ and embarks on a survival journey.

Ms Lewis, who was brought up on a farm near Cardigan and was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Fiction prize in 2022, said: "Men are too often the protagonists in dystopian novels.

"I wanted a woman – someone who has been a wife and mother – as the main character, in order to challenge assumptions about the kind of people that survive catastrophic events, and to see events from a different viewpoint."

The novel follows Aeronwy as she treks more than a hundred miles to the west Wales coast, hoping her brother may still be at their family farm.

However, it soon becomes clear that her greatest challenge is not finding food or keeping warm but dealing with loneliness.

Ms Lewis’ work has garnered praise from the literary community.

Her short story Piano Solo won the 2020 William Faulkner Short Story Contest, and an early version of The Significance of Swans was shortlisted for the Bristol Prize in 2018 and was runner-up in the 2019 New Welsh Writing Awards.

The chairperson of the Bristol Prize judges hailed the novel as "Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, written with a woman’s sensitivity and interiority."

The Significance of Swans will be launched at Cardigan Castle on October 12.

The book is available now for £8.99 from Y Lolfa.