Böcker av Christopher Meredith

Funny, lyrical and poignant, Shifts is a novel of the decline of industry and of the south Wales working class in the 1970s. It broke new ground on its appearance in combining a real, close-up depiction of work and ordinary lives with symbolic power and a wider imaginative reach. Jack Priday, down-at-heel and almost down and out, returns to his hometown towards the end of the 1970s after a decade's absence, just looking for a way to get by. His life becomes entangled with those of old friends Keith, Judith and O, and with the slow death throes of the male-dominated heavy industries that have shaped and defined the region and its people for almost two centuries. As circumstances shift around them, the principals are forced to find some understanding of them and to confront their own secret natures. From multiple viewpoints, Shifts is a slow-burning, controlled and intense examination of the relationship between our inner lives, the people around us and the forces of history.

Octogenarian language geek Vernon, who's never written a book, tries to find a way to write the story of his long marriage to Hannah. Under the comic surface of Vernon's pompous voice hides a story of murderous fantasy, obsession, passion and regret. A verbally brilliant tragicomic short novel with some surprising twists and a moving denouement.

Renowned poet/novelist Christopher Meredith's new poetry collection Still, uses the title word as a fulcrum to balance various paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. Lively and thought-provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, humane and intelligent collection.

In the dream I'm travelling very fast and without effort high over the ground as if I'm a bird flying. There's the trackless mass of trees and strips of mountain ridges and the thread of river like sour milk. The sky is dark blue and red like bruises. I swoop down and then up to miss smashing into the crowns of the trees and I see the bruised air and the black horizon. I come to a figure standing on the heather. He stands with his arms flung out, the fingers spread, like branches. I come close to his face, to his untidy red moustache and his head split by an appalling wound. On two nights separated by a gap of a dozen years, Griffri ap Berddig, a poet at the court of a minor Welsh prince of the twelfth century, tells his life story to a Cistercian monk. Part boast and part confession, his words turn into a compelling narrative which develops through an accumulation of obsessive images towards self-revelation. A complex mixture of historical detail and invention, Griffri is a serious and entertaining novel examining the limits of our knowledge of the world and ourselves. Christopher Meredith is a poet, novelist and currently lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Born in Tredegar and educated at Abersytwyth and Swansea, he worked for some time in a south Wales steel plant, and as a teacher. His novels are Shifts, Griffri and Sidereal Time, and he is the author of a collection of poetry, Snaring Heaven. His books are taught in universities in Wales and England.

Christopher Meredith''s new poetry collection, Air Histories, is his fourth from Seren. One of the best writers of his generation in the UK, the rich textures of his work mirror the landscapes and complex histories of places he knows including the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons national park.

In Brief Lives, six fictions by prize-winning author Christopher Meredith take us from the South China Sea in 1946 through a series of vivid tales in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to a climactic story set at the end of time. These are moving stories executed in precise and luminous prose by a key Welsh writer at the height of his powers.