Flame and Slag

Flame and Slag is Ron Berry’s masterpiece. It is a richly complex novel which uses the fictional sieve of Caib Colliery and the village of Daren to give meaning to the kaleidoscopic history of all the South Wales valleys in the last century. The unspeakable horror of Aberfan in 1966 was the terrible nemesis of that now lost world, and as re-imagined in this remarkable 1968 novel is the cusp time in the intertwined lives of the lovers, Rees Stevens and Ellen Vaughan, and of Ellen’s father, John whose journal is the book-within-a book which Rees must discover and interpret if all the fires of living on are not to fall into cold ash.