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Lisa Sheppard reviews
Dat’s Love and Other Stories
by Leonora Brito

Towards the end of her autobiography, Sugar and Slate, a seminal contribution to the understanding of modern Wales, Charlotte Williams charges us to listen to the ‘chorus of voices that make up what it is to be Welsh’. Leonora Brito’s is a voice that, once heard, is not easy to forget. The inclusion of her only published volume of short stories, Dat’s Love, in the ‘Library of Wales’ series is a sign that different Welsh voices are being heard: as far as I am aware, Brito’s work is the first by a non-white author to be included as a single-authored text in the series, and she is one of little more than a handful of women whose novels or short story collections have been included, too. Added to that, her striking first person narrators, her ear for dialogue, and her vivid descriptions of Cardiff’s docklands (before the development of the more commercialised Cardiff Bay), make Dat’s Love a collection that is unequivocally worthy of note.

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