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Widely acclaimed for its warm humour, lyricism and honesty, as well as its accurate evocation of the thirties, Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve has become a sung-after classic. In this delightful autobiographical novel, Dannie Abse skilfully interweaves public and private themes, setting the fortunes of a Jewish family in Wales against the troubled backcloth of the times- unemployment, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and the Spanish Civil War.

When railway signalman Harry Price suffers a stroke his son Matthew, a lecturer in London, makes a return to the border village of Glynmawr. As Matthew and Harry struggle with their memories of social and personal change, a beautiful and moving portrait of the love between a father and son emerges.

The Caves of Alienation is a story of unfolding revelation about the difficult, fascinating character of Caradock. His family made their fortune from the industry of Wales, but his cosseted childhood in the Welsh valleys only fuelled his desire to leave, and his efforts to escape are explored through the multi-voiced narrative. Then there are his crucial first encounters with sex, his literary success in London and his final withdrawal to Wales. But it is the riveting manner of the telling which gives The Caves of Alienation its virtuosity. It is told from a variety of viewpoints, some conflicting, all interrelated. Friends and enemies, literary rivals, lovers, critics, the 'official biography' even television and radio documentaries jostle each other in the narrative with their own (sometimes feigning) fragments of truth. Caradock's own novels and essays play a vital part in the story. All this makes for an exhilarating, kaleidoscopic read, funny and profound by turns, yet never flinching in its portrayal of Caradock and his deepest preoccupations. The phrase tour de force is a tired one, but it has seldom been more justified than in the case of this exceptional novel.

The Alone to the Alone was first published in 1947. It came, Gwyn Thomas recalled, as the "last gasp of the first violent mood" of creation with which he had written his early masterpieces Oscar and The Dark Philosophers. The Alone to the Alone unites Gwyn Thomas' lyrical and philosophical flights of narrative in a satire whose savagery is only relieved by irrepressible laughter. It is Gwyn Thomas' most shaped work: the underlying meaning of South Wales' history is not so much documented as laid bare for universal dissection and dissemination. The novel, with its distinctive plural narration, is a choric commentary on human illusion and knowledge, on power and its attendant deprivation, on dreams and their destruction. The Alone to the Alone is History as Carnival and, in Gwyn Thomas' unique voice, a comic vision of humanity that recognises no geographical boundaries.

Hannah Ellis is thirty-five, unmarried and still living at Y Glyn, the family farm in Wales where she has been brought up by her mother and step-father, a forbidding man with a powerful hold on the neighbourhood. Loving her country, yet resenting the egotism of her family, she yearns for the return of her long-banished brother Philip, believing that he will rescue her from this bleak existence. But Hannah little realises that Philip's arrival is imminent, and is to herald enormous changes as he unwittingly ignites the passions and strengths of an unusually intertwined community.