Shifts

'the prose is spare and poetic, at once plain and rich, musical in its rhythms of speech and clear descriptions… A beautiful, understated first novel' – The New York Times

'A first novel of consummate skill' – The Sunday Times

'witty, compassionate, and brilliantly readable' – Diana Wallace

A new edition of this classic Welsh novel with an introduction by Professor Diana Wallace

Funny, lyrical and poignant, Shifts is a novel of the decline of industry and of the south Wales working class in the 1970s. It broke new ground on its appearance in combining a real, close-up depiction of work and ordinary lives with symbolic power and a wider imaginative reach.

Jack Priday, down-at-heel and almost down and out, returns to his hometown towards the end of the 1970s after a decade's absence, just looking for a way to get by. His life becomes entangled with those of old friends Keith, Judith and O, and with the slow death throes of the male-dominated heavy industries that have shaped and defined the region and its people for almost two centuries.

As circumstances shift around them, the principals are forced to find some understanding of them and to confront their own secret natures. From multiple viewpoints, Shifts is a slowburning, controlled and intense examination of the relationship between our inner lives, the people around us and the forces of history.