Brief Lives

£9.99

Christopher Meredith

In ‘Brief Lives’, six fictions by prize-winning author 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, and many places in between.

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SKU: 9781781724521 Category: Tag:

Description

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.

Additional information

Weight 310 g
Dimensions 19.8 × 12.9 × 1.9 cm
Author

Publisher

Seren

Imprint

Cover

Hardback

Pages

140

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

823.92 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K