Publisher: Cockatrice Books, 2015 | ISBN: 978-1912368112 | Format: 20.3×12.7cm paperback | Length: 162 pages | Price: £7.99.
For His Warriors: Thirty Stories is the second of a series of three collections by Rob Mimpriss. It is preceded by Reasoning and followed by Prayer at the End.
Being with Melanie gives me hopes and ideas. I could find room in my flat for this girl; I could swap strains of the virus with her, give my T-cells something to whinge about. And it’s just then it sinks in that I’m going to outlive her, and in this moment of loneliness, the world feels transient and flimsy, a girls’ fashion that will be memory by winter, that already is a memory.
A Welsh farmer’s wife during the Second World War kills the land-girl her husband has taken as his lover. A leader of the Cornish-language revival commits her last act of protest the day Russian troops march into Berlin. A lonely man on the waterfront at Llandudno wonders whether he or his girlfriend will be first to die of Aids, and a bored man in a restaurant in Cardiff Bay invents a story of arrest and torture in Czechoslovakia to amuse his petulant lover.
‘These stories are a rare kind of joy. Even when they approach moments of discontent and danger they bring to the reader an optimism founded in human relationships. This is a wonderful collection.’
Prof. Graëme Harper, Editor, New Writing
‘Both humour and pity often arise from the characters’ inability to understand themselves and those close to them. In suggesting both the truth and the self-deception Mimpriss not only engages our sympathy but makes us question our assumptions about ourselves’
Caroline Clark, gwales.com
‘There is nothing ostentatious about his writing: most of his characters lead unremarkable, even humdrum, lives; there are few dramatic plot developments; the writing does not draw attention to itself. And yet the best of these pieces express something important about psychology and human relationships, and the sparseness of the writing is capable of considerable power.’
Brian George, The Short Review
‘In Llandudno today... a woman crossed the road as we passed in the car and this action triggered in me the memory of a moment in a story by Rob Mimpriss when a character crosses the road in Llandudno. This means the story has properly gone to where all good stories need to go in readers — deep into the imagination, to live there. The story is called “Valiant” in the collection For His Warriors. I recommend it. Highly. It feels to me already a classic.’
Fiona Owen, author, Going Gentle and editor, Scintilla
Dr Sarah Gallup is a clinical psychologist at the California Department of State Hospitals. She also runs a podcast exploring the history of mental health care and the stories of people who lived or worked Behind the Walls of the World’s Psychiatric Hospitals. In six recent episodes she reads from Dangerous Asylums...
Read postAll newsThe day was dull, rather misty, and wet under foot, but neither too warm nor too cold for walking. I began to think (without being especially aware that I was thinking) about the place of blood in Christian iconography, about the chapel in which I was raised, which seemed mildly obsessed with it...
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‘freely and fiercely inventive short stories… supercharged with ideas.’
Jon Gower, Nation Cymru
‘heaving with loss, regret and familial bonds.’
Annexe Magazine
‘sketched with a depth and sureness of touch which makes them memorable and haunting.’
Caroline Clark, gwales.com
‘dark, complex, pensively eloquent’
Sophie Baggott, New Welsh Review
Translated by T. Gwynn Jones, with an introduction by Rob Mimpriss.
‘Lucid, skilful, and above all, of enormous timely significance.’
Jim Perrin
‘In this exemplary collaboration between medical science and imagination, lives preserved in official records, in the language and diagnoses of their times, are restored not just to light, but to humanity and equality. This anthology is a resurrection.’
Philip Gross
‘An invaluable translation.’
Angharad Price
Translated by Rob Mimpriss, with an introduction by E. Morgan Humphreys