Black Parade is the historical novel cast as gripping saga, a page turner and a half. There are the real life events... and the artillery noises-off of faraway battles. But the true sense of history is there in the telling detail, the sort of stuff that a novelist who first went to work underground at the age of twelve would know.

 

Jack Jones brings it all, and I mean all, to pulsing, chaotic and ambitious life, with its new institutions such as the Town Hall and its many theatres, its hospital and public parks, all helping to shore up an evolving sense of civic pride. Its townspeople can still feel exceedingly proud of the writings of one of the town’s, and indeed Wales’s, most compelling writers, able to show life in all its toughness and tenderness and all the myriad shades in between.