Cariad County: a place of anarchy and farce, of the grotesque and the slapstick, of tragedy and violent comedy, where the local hunt is disrupted by a camel-riding hero, where the town hall burns down as the town cheers, a place haunted by grotesque revenants from the First World War. This is the world of Nigel Heseltine's short stories.
Edited with an introduction by Daniel Hughes'A restless shape-shifter from the mysterious WelshMarches, Heseltine was as elusive in his idiosyncraticwriting as in his extraordinary globetrotting life. Itis good to have his work briefly pinned down in thisgroundbreaking collection for closer inspection.'- Professor M.Wynn ThomasCariad County: a place of anarchy and farce, of the grotesqueand the slapstick, of tragedy and violent comedy, where thelocal hunt is disrupted by a camel-riding hero, where thetown hall burns down as the town cheers, a place hauntedby grotesque revenants from the First World War.This is the world of Nigel Heseltine's short stories, fantasticfictions which lampoon and lament the slow decline of theonce-powerful squires and landowners of mid-Wales, thevery Montgomeryshire of which Heseltine (1916-1995)formed a part.Nigel Heseltine is a long-neglected member of Wales's'Golden Generation' of English-language short story writerswhich included Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies and Glyn Jones.His stories appeared alongside theirs in major magazinessuch as English Story and Penguin New Writing in the1930s and 1940s.This volume re-prints for the first time since their initialpublication the stories published in Heseltine's Tales ofthe Squirearchy (1946), alongside a substantial numberof stories never previously collected. Ranging from thestarkly surreal to the subtly moving, these tales reveal NigelHeseltine as a singularly talented writer, the equal of hisbetter-known contemporaries.