This book will be released on October 1st 2026.
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Introduced by Julia Bell
'Mr Abse writes beautifully and tenderly of the things he has seen and felt.'
– The Times
‘This book is a modern classic which speaks keenly to our present moment, both in its autofictional style which gives the book a recognisably modern point of view, and in the background hum of anxiety about tyranny and mortality as it impinges on the everyday. They say the past is a foreign country, but in Abse’s 1930s, the past is surprisingly familiar territory, bittersweet, fragile, tenderly alive.’ – 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.
Dannie Abse (1923-2014) was born in Cardiff. He began his medical studies at the Welsh National School of Medicine and qualified as a doctor from Westminster Hospital, London in 1950. While still a student, Abse’s first book of poems was published and his first play performed. Further poetry volumes followed over the decades, culminating in his final collection Speak, Old Parrot in 2013 (shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize) and Ask the Moon: New and Collected Poems 1948-2014. His first novel, Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve, appeared in 1954 and his most recent, the Booker longlisted The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr Glas in 2002. Three prize-winning plays were collected in The View from Row G (1990) and his autobiography, Goodbye, Twentieth Century, was published in 2001. Recognised internationally as a poet, Abse was President of the Poetry Society and of the Welsh Academy of Letters, and among his awards were the Wales Book of the Year for The Presence, the Wilfred Owen Award and the Roland Mathias Prize. He was appointed a CBE in 2012.