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Sharp, sad and romantic, Dannie Abse's reminiscences tell of the private fortunes of a Jewish family in Cardiff amid the troubled tapestry of the twentieth century - unemployment, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and the Spanish civil war.

This book is the winner of the Wales book of the year. Loss, grief and love are the themes of this remarkable memoir from one of Britain's most distinguished poets. Some months after Dannie Abse's wife Joan died in a car accident in June 2005, he began to write a diary which is both a record of present grief and a portrait of marriage which lasted more than 50 years. It is an extraordinary document, painful but celebratory; funny as well as sad, bursting with joy as well as sorrow and full of a deep understanding of what it means to be human.

Dr Simmonds is infatuated with an unhappily married patient, Yvonne. When she presents him with a novel about a certain Dr Glas, Simmonds immediately recognizes his own affinity with the fictional doctor. The trouble is that Dr Glas deliberately murders the husband of the one he loved.

Wales has provided Britain with some of the finest poetry of the century, from the modernism of David Jones, the powerful lyrics of Dylan Thomas and the understatement of R.S. Thomas to a host of talented younger poets. In this, the definitive anthology of 'Anglo-Welsh' poetry, Dannie Abse, himself one of Wales's most dsitinguished poets, has chosen the outstanding poets and poems of the last century, displaying a breadth and variety which belies the usual notions of 'regional poetry.' Abse's selection will delight, surprise and provoke. It begins with Georgian poets W.H. Davies and Edward Thomas and the war poet Wilfred Owen. It includes the miner-poet Idris Davies, the lyrics of Vernon Watkins and writers such as Tony Conran, T.H. Jones and Nigel Jenkins, for whom Welsh language poetry is a major influence. Polemicists such as Harry Webb and John Tripp stand beside the elegance of John Ormond and Leslie Norris, while history and world events loom in the work of Tony Curtis and Duncan Bush. Robert Minhinnick, John Davies, Paul Henry and Stephen Knight add to the list of another generation of talented poets. And, as the century progressed, so women poets gained wider readership: Jean Earle, Gillian Clarke, Christine Evans, Gwyneth Lewis, Hilary Llewellyn-Williams and Deryn Rees-Jones among them. English language poetry in Wales is largely a twentieth century phenomenon: as this anthology demonstrates, its contribution to poetry in Britain is influential beyond its brief history.