Brief Lives John Stuart Clark

Brief Lives John Stuart ClarkIn Brief Lives, six fictions by Christopher Meredith take the reader from the South China Sea in 1946 to a nameless place at the end of time, where the dead have risen. In between are stories in the new post war South Wales, in which characters sense their aloneness while being a part of the larger world. The individual and community has been at the heart of much of Merediths prose and poetry, as it has been in British life over the last century, and

hooting owls

bringing us closer to this man than to many other modern protagonists

offer it to a pregnant woman who wants a son

that cracks open the novel

Andrew Wynn Owen has replied with friendly enthusiasm

Hédi Abdel-Jaouad

his hand closed on sweets to surprise his grandchildren

and with adoptive parents

culminating in the Battle of Cable Street when 100

• Pascale Petit

as well as an informed outsider's view of the subject by distinguished American poet

poetry that is always lyrical and on occasion truly startling"