The woman at the window - Emyr Humphreys

At the age of ninety, celebrated Welsh novelist Emyr Humphreys gives us this gentle, but haunting selection of short stories, the latest addition to a lifetime of writing, which has included 21 novels as well as short stories, poetry and essays.

His theme is life, past and future and the importance of parental and filial love down the generations. His protagonists look back over the pattern of their lives, and often forward also, for the chance to rekindle lost loves and find a home for themselves, either in Wales or in a sunny, but alien expat Europe.

Many characters live with the ghosts of the past, but the memories and lingering regrets mix with a sharp sense that you are never to old for life to throw surprises at you: three comfortably retired men find their sedate reunion dinner turn into a conflict with a knife-wielding escaped prisoner in a pre-Celtic tomb; a trip to the site of their first meeting brings a married couple face to face with a corpse and illusions are shattered when an retired head teacher meets again with his first love.
Friends pass on, partners are left alone, but it is the survivors who are the focus of this collection, the threads of their life examined from childhood to old age. Often their experiences are seen against a wider sense of shifting, post-war Europe, a Europe and a Wales that has become home to refugees from Hungary, Poland or Romania, putting down roots, broadening lives, bringing freshness and change.

This is a collection of mature reflection, weighing up the best part of a century of European history and experience, loss and moving on.