The Likes of Us by Stan Barstow was favourably reviewed in The Guardian on Friday 5 April. On our new title The Likes of Us: Stories of Five Decades, Hickling wrote:

Among the highlights, "A Season with Eros" is a hilariously candid account of newlywed passion doused by a sour-faced mother-in-law, while the hooligan protagonist of "The Desperadoes" ("Sometimes you feel you just can't rest until you've smashed summat") is a reminder that Barstow's fury made most other angry young men seem only mildly annoyed.

In a recent Guardian interview the British novelist Rupert Thomson suggested that:

 

'Fiction essentially teaches you to understand and empathise with other people. That’s important. I think fiction is related to ethics in that you step out of your skin and become someone else for the period you are reading the book. And it is a short step to extrapolate from that to the teaching of compassion.'

 

I took these thoughts with me into a reading of the artful, economical short stories marshalled into Dorothy Edwards’s Rhapsody, first published in 1927. These terse and ironic tales seem to teach us very little about compassion, or much about human warmth and connectedness for that matter.

 

The ten stories that make up Rhapsody – with an additional three bonus tales in this LOW edition – do not make for empathetic fiction, yet they are undoubtedly fine works, taut and elegantly wrought narratives with never a single word wasted.  They are always, unutterably refined, yes, that’s the word, very refined.

'There is something positively lysergic about this novel, set against the backdrop of the religious convulsion, the revival which brought Wales to its praying knees in 1904 and 1905.  It is a book so chock full of visions, lucid dreams and hallucinations – and they are so hyper-vividly described – that one imagines the grocer’s son from Clydach Vale dropping a few tabs of acid while penning it, even though this was written in 1927, a full four decades before Timothy Leary and his West Coast chemical experiments.'

the mind quivering amid broken spheres of split radiance and flaming skies, that opened before the inner vision a kingdom of unearthly emotion, where landscapes were voices of strange chants, where music was carved into symbols of crystal colour, and stars opened into faces of inspired beauty…

Sian Lile-Pastore is starting a new book/reading group in St Fagans which looks really good. She says: "We will be reading and discussing novels with Welsh or historical links. We will also have talks with curators and experts to tie in with the books. Join our first ever book club and discuss The Rebecca Rioter by Amy Dillwyn. After the discussion there will also be a chance to visit the Tollhouse in St Fagans with curator Sioned Hughes. Booking essential : (029) 2057 3424"

The first session will meet at St Fagans on Saturday 16 March (11am-1pm).

Join the Facebook Group for St Fagans' Book Group.