BOOKS & reviews

 

"Every one of Tredegar-born writer Christopher Meredith’s sequence of fictions has been a literary event relished by a faithful and appreciative following. He has emerged as one of our most distinctive, imaginative, unexpectedly elegant and humane writers." - Jim Perrin in Wales Arts Review

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Shifts
"the classic statement about the [post-industrial] situation, both social and personal" - Prof. Stephen Knight in One Hundred Years of Fiction

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"A first novel of consummate skill" - The Sunday Times

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"A beautiful, understated first novel" - The New York Times

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 "A novel so good it is hard to believe it is his first" - Western Mail

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 "Written ... superbly, with a poet's eye, mind and voice" - The Guardian

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"Arguably the pinnacle of Welsh (post) industrial fiction" Aleksander Bednarski in Orbis Litterarum

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"the more one probes it, the more one uncovers the complex patterning of a poetic novel of ideas" -Richard Poole in the Afterword to the Seren Classics edition.

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"One of the greatest novels ever written about Wales" - Prof. Kirsti Bohata

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"Like very great novels, the power of Shifts is to evoke universal themes in a believably rendered microcosmic reality. ...If as a nation we seek to venerate a book that helps us understand ourselves and our circumstances, and that uses the novel’s power to investigate the psychological fallout of socio-historical trauma while at the same time being skip-along readable and viciously funny, let’s stop the search here. The book is Shifts." - Dylan Moore in Wales Arts Review, nominating Shifts as his choice as the Greatest Welsh novel of All Time.

Snaring Heaven

"meditative, philosophical verse, made accessible by its strong links with place, personal experience, memory and history" - Planet

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"Fine, resonant poems" - Jill Farringdon in Poetry Wales

Griffri
"This extraordinary novel takes historical fiction and runs with it as far as it can go. It is a beautifully written story that does not simply recreate the life of a Mediaeval Welsh Prince's court - it also injects a philosophical slant that questions the very nature of history and examines the limits of our knowledge of the world and ourselves" - Christopher Lean in The Historical Novel Society's Review

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"A magnificent achievement" - Friends of the Welsh Books Council Newsletter

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"His Middle Ages also manage to be universal. Writers are too often tempted to write about writing, and it rarely comes off. Meredith has found a way which does." - Robin Blake in The Independent on Sunday

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"A book of uncommon interest and appeal" - Norman Shrapnel in The Guardian

Sidereal Time
"This lyrical novel is never dull because it is so well written, and Meredith is inspired when describing the pressures and difficulties of the teaching environment." - The Guardian

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"An amazingly brave, funny and touching book" - Time Out

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"Sidereal Time is an acutely observed philosophical novel, [...] both vital and compelling" - Claire Powell on the Gwales website​​

Translation of Melog by Mihangel Morgan

"A cracking read. ...this extraordinary book shames us into realising that the best writers in Britain don't necessarily work in English." - Dan Rhodes in The Observer

"the translation captures the zaniness of the original and reads well as a novel in English" - Planet

The Meaning of Flight
"The defining feature of Christopher Meredith's poetry is an exquisite, almost painful precision" - Sarah Crown in The Guardian

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"...not a false note or a wobble. It is in the thematic content that the maturity of vision shows itself." - Nicholas Murray in Planet

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The Book of Idiots

"This is a novel about the seriousness of play, about hubris, friendship and sanity against the odds. It is also a literary masterpiece about narrative technique that plays with its own forms (tragedy, farce, romance). It is a thriller in which we guess who survives rather than who will die next." - Western Mail

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"A darkly comic triumph full of uncomfortable truths." - ShortList Magazine

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"A success that may be unprecedented... The book is subtle. Age-old questions of free will, fate and chance gnaw at the dystopia and questions spring into the reader's moral mind. Read it. You will hold in your hands a work of consummate skill." - Planet

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"A master of dialogue, capturing distinctive speech patterns that reveal the essence of the people behind them...The Book of Idiots impresses at many levels—structure, language, characterization, and insights...deserves the widest possible readership." - Serving House Journal (USA)

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Air Histories

"Air Histories successfully pricks both the intellect and the emotions. It connects our own lived histories with moving stories of humanity drawn in a weathered landscape of changing horizons and shifting air." - New Welsh Review

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"As with many an offbeat maker, there is passion there,...for the good of the earth, for people." - David Hart in Stride

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"As playful as it is profound" - Jeremy Hooker in Planet

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"A blinding play of images" - The Independent

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 "One of the main achievements of these poems is to create a sense of aerial over-view – of vision that sees the connectedness of many things: the dead to the living, the inventions and tools of the dead in the hands of the living, the dead and the living in the landscape...a collection of great variety and texture." - Elsewhere - A Review of Contemporary Poetry (http://oftime2.wordpress.com/)

 

Brief Lives

"Six stellar stories" - Buzz Magazine

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"Christopher Meredith has a keen eye for the nuances of human behaviour.... He brings into sharp focus the tiny verbal and non-verbal signals that can shape an interaction, as well as the mental narratives and preoccupations that influence the way each character responds to his or her environment. He achieves this level of detail while driving the narrative forward - his tales are engrossing, never laboured.... 
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."  - Jenny White in The Western Mail

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"Superbly written...Beautifully achieved fictions." - New Welsh Review

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"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." - Jim Perrin in Wales Arts Review here

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"Intensely achieved and confirms his reputation as a writer of fierce intelligence and razor-sharp observation....
'The Enthusiast' [is] the longest and perhaps most powerful and moving story in the collection... It is worth buying Brief Lives for this story alone... 
There is a meticulousness in the fine detail of descriptions of people and places that has an almost hypnotic effect." 
- Suzy Ceulan Hughes on the Gwales website

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"Meredith does not flinch from reality, but here, like Conrad, proves master of an obliqueness which reveals that which cannot be faced." - Mary-Ann Constantine in Planet

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"A tight, powerful little book. Meredith...has produced a collection that plays very much to his strengths as a stylist."  - Gary Raymond, BBC Radio Wales Review Show

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"Fantastic. There's not a bad story in the collection." - Jafar Iqbal, Review Show

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 "I loved this collection. Really clever." - Emma Schofield, Review Show

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Still

‘Richly engaging... Meredith’s formal skills – he has a striking gift for rhythm and metaphor – illuminate the psycho-geography of his mental landscapes... 

By any yardstick, Still is a major achievement.' - Steve Whitaker in Yorkshire Times

 

'beautifully achieved’ – Tony Brown in Planet

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 ‘intelligent and expertly-made poems, all of them worth reading, memorising... He’s startlingly good at selecting – "stilling" – details to convey landscapes, interiors, events... the poems in Still gain ethical force from their cumulative revelation of a sensibility that’s alternately wise, funny, ironic, tender and barbed, but always with a sympathetic curiosity about other people and the shared world.’ – Steven Lovatt in thefridaypoem.com

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'...a collection distinguished by a carefully controlled lyricism and grace that moves, by turns, through the purely lyric or contemplative mode, the historical monologue, the more lightweight linguistically playful, to the evocation of place, and to what we may call the symbolist/talismanic mode...

...the reader is struck with continual delight with the sharpness and aptness of the imagery...

....haunting and resonant... this volume is mercifully full of the wondrously inexplicable, and is therefore to be unstintingly recommended.' - Henry Bradley in Acumen

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'Still is a polished performance. The poet's keen eye and characteristically inventive response are the unifying features... . Precise observation of subjects and events is one thing; finding, and blending, the precise words to convey the experience is entirely another. But this instinct Meredith possesses, whether he is teasing out the peculiarly static nature of personal recollection, or descanting on evanescence in the movement of snow.' - Sam Adams in PN Review

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‘Meredith’s craftmanship takes us to the ‘edge of sense’; yes, he takes us with him, and generously shares his thoughts while doing so... a deeply intelligent and moving collection’ – Nathan Mundy in Wales Arts Review

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'Still builds on Meredith’s examination (in Brief Lives and Air Histories, for example) of paradox, particularly around memory and its tides, stasis and motion, and the complexity of stillness in art. He describes memories of high emotion particularly well, where memory holds frozen seconds like a series of still photographs. Do those memories record or shape our past?... These are complex poems that ask rather than answer questions and he queries how a slice of memory is selected from a life full of action to lie in our churning brains as if that moment happens continuously.... 

Towards the close of the collection is a section of stunning nature poems....

Still’s mix of introspective memory, nature poems, holidays in Llandudno and quirky pieces gives the collection its own drive, unified by theme and Meredith’s technical mastery, and it’s a wonderful experience.' - Rosie Johnston in London Grip 

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‘Superb.. the writing here is spare and subtle. The unsaid is as important as the said... Still is a quiet, contemplative book which offers no certainties aside from the fact that Meredith’s words deserve to outlive his time.’ – Joshua Rees in Buzz

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‘lapidaraidd, gloyw’ [‘lapidary and luminous’] -  Katie Gramich in O’r Pedwar Gwynt

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Please

‘Brilliant... elegant, funny and moving’ – Joshua Rees in Buzz

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‘Remarkable... highly original... flawlessly constructed... A virtuoso performance that lingers for a long time in the memory.’ - Jenny White in The Western Mail

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‘This clever, funny and ultimately very moving novel demonstrates how language is, as Meredith writes, “the very stuff of us.”’ – Laura Wainwright in New Welsh Review

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‘...a tour-de-force of wit and the relish for language but still reveals the whole of an anguished life. It is parodic, dark and surprisingly touching... Vernon [the narrator] is at once both comic and tragic, both consciously and unconsciously, and the subtlety of Meredith’s writing is a delight.’ - Caroline Clark in Gwales

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‘inventive and witty ... Vernon’s loquacity produces some beautiful and striking description... Vernon’s narrative is cleverly constructed and precisely assembled, and his linguistic fixations enhance, rather than hinder, the elucidations of the plot.’ Gareth Smith in Wales Arts Review

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'Please is a high-wire act and a tour-de-force, and withal, incisively human and mordantly humorous, of a piece with the narrator's insistent voice' - Sam Adams in PN Review

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‘hynod o ddoniol... Hiwmor du fel y fagddu yw arbenigedd ffuglen Meredith. Themâu dwys a phwysig sy’n llechu’r tu ôl i’r hiwmor, serch hynny: themâu megis cariad, cof, siom a cholled.’

[‘Extremely funny... Pitch black humour is a speciality of Meredith’s fiction. Despite that profound and important themes lie beneath it, themes like love, memory, disappointment and loss.’] – Katie Gramich in O’r Pedwar Gwynt

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‘by turn sardonic, nostalgic, poignant. Vernon, adrift in his disappointments, entrapped in the the evasive verbiage of the Human Resources industry (brilliantly parodied by Meredith) is an utterly convincing creation. ... a novel to read and reread. It is a fascinating, moving study of an individual who for all his idiosyncrasies, expresses thoughts and feelings which are deeply and resonantly human.’ Tony Brown in Planet

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'I was hooked from the first sentence: “Punctuation killed my wife.”

'In a darkly funny, meandering, auto-didactically erudite voice, Vernon tells us of his love for Hannah, the ups and downs of their marriage, his affection for the letter V. The story, meaty and layered, is studded with insights and unexpected turns. There is sex and betrayal, work, loss, existential loneliness, ambition, grammar, “the stuff of life that both hardens and softens us.” The writing is an utter delight, the work of a master enjoying his facility with words.

'Toward the end of the book, musing on etymological connections between the words for love and care in English, Welsh, and Latin, Vernon says, “We have here some slight sign of the cousinage of tongues, of those webs of concepts and associations, somehow spun by many purblind spiders in a fumbling darkness crawling insensibly over and among one another without sense of precedence or order, which occasionally gleam in flitting daylights upon our understanding as they intersect and bifurcate. Fleetingly we behold how words in these trembling threads attempt…to ensnare the mysterious stuff of life.” This stunningly good book does just that.' - Carin Clevidence in The Common

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