Böcker av Dai Smith

A mix of deceitfully plain reportage; fictive history and fictional forays into the past. As he reaches eighty Dai Smith comes out swinging with Measuring the Distance.

From a working-class Rhondda childhood through to the glamour of Barry Grammar and onto a coveted Balliol College scholarship and study in New York, David Smith was the rising intellectual star of a generation. In this beautifully written memoir Dai Smith engages and entertains with a personal life and times with the characteristic verve of a writer who has illuminated the modern history of the people of South Wales.

RAYMOND WILLIAMS was the most influentialsocialist writer and thinker in post-war Britain. Now, making full use of Williams's private and unpublishedpapers and by placing him in a wide social and culturallandscape, Dai Smith uncovers how Williams's life to 1961 is an explanationof his immense intellectual achievement.

The Crossing bridges the past and the present andconnects Wales with America, as it tells of coal ownersand coal workers in the age of great transatlantic linersand fortunes to be made.

A white-knuckle fiction ride through the South Wales Valleys during the 20th century. Power, sex, money and ambition all twist through the pages as Smith creates a feast of intellectual and physical provocation stories that send a shudder of fearful recognition through to the reader.

Composite novel Dream On is a black comedy, a flashlight noir thriller, and a meditation on the lives and stories that connect up the frayed wires in the business of living: of Digger Davies and his one cap for Wales and ultimately untimely death...and the award-winning photographer whose return home will become a quest for his own forgotten identity and compromised life...the thwarted politician in a hospital bed writing his own obituary...and a beautiful girl caught in time, alive in an old man's memory...

Using a rich array of material from Raymond Williams' hitherto unused personal papers, diaries, letters, unpublished novels and stories, notebooks, work drafts and fragments, this title takes us through the formative years on the Welsh Border as the son of a railway signalman and his wife, on to Cambridge in 1939 and War service in Normandy.