A Day's Pleasure and Other Tales

Edited with an introduction by Daniel Hughes

'A restless shape-shifter from the mysterious Welsh
Marches, Heseltine was as elusive in his idiosyncratic
writing as in his extraordinary globetrotting life. It
is good to have his work briefly pinned down in this
groundbreaking collection for closer inspection.'
- Professor M.Wynn Thomas

Cariad County: a place of anarchy and farce, of the grotesque
and the slapstick, of tragedy and violent comedy, where the
local hunt is disrupted by a camel-riding hero, where the
town hall burns down as the town cheers, a place haunted
by grotesque revenants from the First World War.
This is the world of Nigel Heseltine's short stories, fantastic
fictions which lampoon and lament the slow decline of the
once-powerful squires and landowners of mid-Wales, the
very Montgomeryshire of which Heseltine (1916-1995)
formed a part.
Nigel Heseltine is a long-neglected member of Wales's
'Golden Generation' of English-language short story writers
which included Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies and Glyn Jones.
His stories appeared alongside theirs in major magazines
such as English Story and Penguin New Writing in the
1930s and 1940s.
This volume re-prints for the first time since their initial
publication the stories published in Heseltine's Tales of
the Squirearchy (1946), alongside a substantial number
of stories never previously collected. Ranging from the
starkly surreal to the subtly moving, these tales reveal Nigel
Heseltine as a singularly talented writer, the equal of his
better-known contemporaries.