Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve

Introduced by Julia Bell

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.

"Mr Abse writes beautifully and tenderly of the things he has seen and felt.” – The Times

-- Publisher: Parthian Books
Dannie Abse's classic 1954 novel Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve has recently been reissued under The Library of Wales banner, a Welsh Assembly Government supported initiative that highlights and celebrates Wales’s literary heritage in the English language. The novel is indeed one worth celebrating. Set in Cardiff in the 1930s, it is really an account of boyhood friendship told with a poet’s humour, and set against the backdrop of turbulent times. Sometimes mistakenly read as an autobiography, this is an autobiographical novel. It draws on Abse’s own life, yes, but reshapes and builds on it to create a literary landscape where Abse’s characters act out the bitter-sweet themes of a pivotal time in twentieth century history. The joys of childhood and adolescence for a Jewish boy growing up in Wales are darkened by the slow intrusion of the growth of fascism in continental Europe. There is a richness to Abse’s prose that can only have been shaped by his complex and sometimes apparently conflicting heritage. As he explained himself, ‘I have two roots, that of Dafydd as well as David.’ He is a non-Welsh speaker from a family that spoke Welsh and Hebrew, a British Jew, a Welshman who chose to largely anglicise himself, and a poet who is also a scientist. I wonder if it is the last point that matters most. As poet Gwyneth Lewis beautifully puts it in her introduction to this new edition of the book, ‘he is a rare example of a person who has made a commitment to the wellbeing of the human spirit simultaneously through the arts and the sciences.’ He certainly has a unique perspective that makes Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve a lyrical, insightful classic that well deserves to find a new generation of readers. -- Michael Nobbs @ www.gwales.com