Brief Lives by Christopher Meredith
From the nightmarish first story set in the South China Sea in 1946 to the final piece, set nowhere at the end of time, Brief Lives demonstrates in a short compass a huge range in technique and milieu and a unity of theme and sensibility. It opens naturalistically but is distinctly non-realist by the close. We meet an ex-collier in 1950 anguishing over whether to return to the pit, a young mother in the early 1960s quietly shepherding those around her through a bleak Christmas day, an industrial chemist in this century plunged into vortices of memories that cause him to question his grasp of the world, and more. Meredith’s fiction has been marked by its willingness to push at literary boundaries, and Brief Lives is no exception: it is an intense distillation of Meredith’s abiding concerns to explore how memory shapes the present and the present shapes memory, the interplay between beautifully realised individual lives and the wider historical process, and the paradox of simultaneous human isolation and community.
Christopher Meredith is the author of Shifts (1988), Griffri (1991) and Sidereal Time (1998). He is also the author of three poetry collections, numerous articles and a book for children in English and Welsh. Meredith's books have consistently attracted high-profile reviews in the Guardian, the Independent, the Sunday Times and the New York Times. A professor of creative writing at the University of Glamorgan, he has given talks, readings and lectures worldwide.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781781724521 |
| ISBN 10 | 1781724520 |
| Title | Brief Lives |
| Author | Christopher Meredith |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Poetry Wales Press |
| Year published | 2018-06-01 |
| Number of pages | 144 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |