In 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 Meredith’s prose and poetry, as it has been in British life over the last century, and it is his skill in creating characters whose brief lives the reader finds engaging, which makes this book so relevant.
In the worlds of Brief Lives, Christopher Meredith is characteristically thought-provoking – sometimes challenging – about what it is to live. Lyrical, authentic and engaging, these fictions tell us about the world and about ourselves.
Brief Lives is published to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Christopher Meredith’s groundbreaking debut novel, Shifts, voted one of the top novels from Wales in English.