The Coward's Tale was published by Bloomsbury in November 2011. It's the kind of book you might steal away to a quiet place to read, it isn’t one that you’d pick up and put down casually if something else happened to catch your attention while the book was in your hands. I’ve never read anything quite like it. It’s described as a novel and I’ve also seen it referred to as an ‘epic.’ I don’t think either of those words do it any justice. I’m not very good at reading novels, I can do it, and I’ve got a strong enough sense of duty to even finish a few of them from time to time. However, reading The Coward’s Tale is not like reading a novel at all where one remains conscious of chapters, pages, page numbers, the spine of the book, noises beyond, it’s more like stepping into a carefully constructed other reality where you can share the same air as the characters for a while – stand with the cinema-goers and listen to Ianto the beggar telling a story about someone in the town who behaves for the most part quite normally except for one small eccentricity – before your living life forces you to close the book and attend to other matters. Sometimes those other matters in your own life seem rather petty compared to what is going on in Ianto’s world, then on the other hand, certain small things in your own life that you paid little attention to a while back seem now to glow slightly and take on a different meaning.

The Coward’s Tale has a quiet solemnity and dignity about it and yet manages at the same time to be funny and strange and touching. By page four, I was already captivated by the charming exchange between the boy and the beggar, the two constant figures throughout the story who keep everything running and together. While reading, it never would’ve surprised me if the town statue had come to life, Vanessa has the gift in the way she writes of making it seem as if something miraculous just might happen at any moment and in the most unlikely of places and for it to have been the most natural of occurrences. Other readers have picked up on this and while they have referred to magic realism, I’d like to refer to the fact that Vanessa is writing about Welsh people, and I’d have thought that was enough by itself. There is, right from the beginning, the sense of a miracle about to happen, and at the very end, it does. There is an exactness about the world Vanessa has created too. Everything does have its place and each character knows his or her place in the ordinary social order where there are bank managers and librarians and shopkeepers, but, one suspects, there is a far older underlying order – a magical order – just glimpsed in flashes beneath the comings and goings in the town.
There are distinct flashes of brilliance in this work that made me catch my breath for their ingenuity as well as beauty. There is a section where Vanessa describes a map of the passages in a coal mine that had been drawn on a hymn sheet in which the words of the hymns appear in ‘the tunnels like angels or devils.’ Again, she describes looking through a stained glass window in a church in a way that is awesome. I am so glad I read The Coward’s Tale, I couldn’t recommend a book more highly than this one.

Ooh - fantastic review. This one is definitely on my TR list. Thanks, Becca.

Hi Sarah,
yes, this book is very special and I deliberately haven't said anything about the stories themselves even.

becca,

I just emailed your review to Vanessa, in case she doesn't get on here much. Hope you don't mind.

Hi Susannah,
No I don't think she does get on here much. Indira and I from Short Story have a story of Vanessa's called 'Breakdown' in 'Pangea' the anthology we've compiled due for publication in April, and very unfortunately, her novel was too late to get mentioned in the biographies at the end of our book. But I'll certainly be promoting it at the book launch in Bristol.
I did show her the review before I uploaded it to make sure she was okay with everything I'd written.