For His Warriors
Thirty Stories
de Rob Mimpriss
*For His Warriors: Thirty Stories* is the second of a series of three collections, 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 Graeme Harper, Editor, *New Writing*. ‘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 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 the memory of a moment in a story by Rob Mimpriss when a character crosses the road in Llandudno. This means the story has 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, *The Green Gate* and editor, *Scintilla*.
