Fiction
Category: Fiction, Short Stories
Number of pages: 144
ISBN: 9781781724521
Publication date: June 1, 2018
Price: £9.99
“A moving, mature kaleidoscope of human experience, each story a polished stone that sits in the memory and begs to be turned over and examined anew.” – The Western Mail
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
Christopher Meredith is the award-winning author of five novels and five collections of poetry and also tranlsates Welsh to English. Prizes include an Eric Gregory Award, the Arts Council of Wales Young Writer Prize and the Fiction Prize for his first novel, Shifts. His second novel, Griffri, was shortlisted for the Book of the Year Award. His collection of poems, The Meaning of Flight, was long-listed for The Book of the Year Award 2006. His most recent full novel is The Book of Idiots (2012). He has given readings all over Britain and Europe as well as in Israel/Palestine and the USA. Born and brought up in Tredegar, he was a steelworker and a schoolteacher before becoming a professor of creative writing at the University of Glamorgan. He lives in Brecon. A collection of six short fictions, titled Brief Lives, was released in 2018.
In 2021 Seren published his short novel Please simultaneously with a new poetry collection Still. Buy both for the discounted price of £15.00 in our two-book deal.
“I loved this collection. Really clever.”
Emma Schofield
“Fantastic. There’s not a bad story in the collection.”
Jafar Iqbal
“A tight, powerful little book. Meredith… has produced a collection that plays very much to his strengths as a stylist.”
Gary Raymond
“Six stellar short stories.”
Buzz Magazine
“Meredith’s prose style is as fine and supple as any contemporary writer I know. It quietly and continually embraces dimensions of symbolism, resonances, that are suggested rather than laboured, and left to lodge in the readers’ imaginations and work there. And they do.”
Wales Arts Review
“A glorious book about everything important: love and sex and conflict and mortality. Meredith writes with such acuity, above all with such generosity.”
Tom Bullough
Christopher Meredith read his story ‘The Cavalry’ for the Alternative Stories and Fake Realities podcast (All content in audio, onscreen and in print is protected and may not be copied or used for any purposes including generative AI/AI training.):
