Set in the author’s native Swansea in South Wales, the ten autobiographical stories in this much-loved collection chart his journey from boyhood – movingly and at times comically evoked in tales such as ‘The Peaches’ and ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’ – to early adulthood. Along the way, in ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’, among others, the vicissitudes of adolescence and a burgeoning sexuality are explored with characteristic tenderness and candour, while ‘Where Tawe Flows’ and ‘One Warm Saturday’ affectionately document the evolution of the young writer’s literary sensibility. Young love, male friendship, death, religion – the gamut of youthful experience is here encapsulated, inflected throughout with Thomas’s typical humanity.
Presented in this volume alongside the rest of the body of fiction produced by the Welsh poet in his short and turbulent life, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), which has proven to be second in popularity only to Thomas’s masterpiece, Under Milk Wood, demonstrates that he was as much a master of prose as he was of poetry.
