The Way Beauty Comes Apart is a transportive and magical, yet grittily real account of life told by the dead of Nefin, a close-knit, fictional community in North West Wales. Entangled characters who cannot but both love and hate one another weave beautiful cloth from what it is to be human-- and sometimes horrible. Cranstal Jones stands behind the bedroom curtains, gazing out at little graves, struggling to keep her sanity, trying to appease the "fair folk" and understand why loss keeps coming for her. Lili Morgan plots to leave Nefin for London but is thwarted by a vicious attack which sends unseen ripples through the entire community for lifetimes to come.

Even as her attacker, Twm Gethin, claims he cannot tell a lie, he becomes a dangerous master of omission whose own heart will also break on the rocky coast. Grandmother and Granddaughter midwives-the Dafydds-tend to the birthing, the dying, and the languishing, keeping to their craft even as modern medicine eclipses ancient practices. These and other disarmingly real characters speak directly to readers from the places they last drew breath. They take readers deep into their lives, their time, their deaths, their "truths," and ultimately their accounts of one another.