As I write, many of us are still reeling at the dreadful Grenfell Tower disaster; a tragedy which has brought injustice and inequality into sharp focus. Caroline Smith’s poetry collection, Immigration Handbook (reviewed by Chris Kinsey) explores injustices towards that most marginalised of groups; asylum seekers. Their stories are here told in forensic detail, making sharp ‘incisions to implant empathy and compassion’. Class and identity closer to home are explored in Suzy Ceulan Hughes’s review of Vegetarian Tigers of Paradise (by Crystal Jeans); a vibrant novel which takes us far beyond the tired old clichés of the working class ‘dysfunctional’ family. Other clichés – namely those of gender and humour – are subverted in Branwen Davies’s review of Stand Up & Sock it to Them Sister, a personal reflection on female stand-up comedy by ‘self-confessed comedy junkie’, Gwenno Dafydd.

Knotty issues of Welsh national identity are untangled in Mike Parker’s review of two markedly different accounts; Tryweryn: A Nation Awakes (Owain Williams) and In Pursuit of St. David (Gerald Morgan). While Simon Williams-Jones – in a review which combines Miles Wyn Cato’s catalogue of Welsh art and Richard Veasey’s picaresque biography of eighteenth century painter, Thomas Jones Pencerrig – explores national identity through the fascinating, yet often hidden, history of Wales’s visual culture.

In Welsh poetry, as in Welsh life, the ‘milltir sgwar’ is rarely far away. Chris Kinsey’s Muddy Fox and Maria Apichella’s Psalmody (both reviewed by Mary Jacob) are both deeply rooted in, and nurtured by, the Welsh landscape, as is Tia Jones’s novel, The Curlew’s Cry (reviewed by Judith Strauss).

The Other Tiger: An Anthology of Latin American Poetry – bracingly reviewed by Maggie Harris – invites us to venture from our own square mile, beyond ‘cocaine crops, Peron [and] the disappeared’, and listen to ‘a powerful echo of human resistance’. In Kat Ellis’s young adult novel, Purge (reviewed by Caroline Clark), the spirit of human resistance is set against a dystopia of religious fundamentalism and hyper-sophisticated technology. In these unsettling times, a book’s unique ability to examine the present, while imagining all possible futures, is perhaps more vital than ever.

Liz Jones is a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University. She is currently writing a biography of the popular romance writer Marguerite Jervis (also known as Oliver Sandys and Countess Barcynska) for Honno Welsh Women’s Press.