Minhinnick and Meredith are both writers of conviction, dazzlingly accomplished authors who show us the big picture by focussing on the individual and the everyday. Minhinnick's stories in The Keys of Babylon carry the hopes and dreams of migrants across the world from Albania, to Mexico, China, Iraq, Israel, Wales and the US. Meredith stays closer to home in The Book of Idiots, his Wales-set blackly comic fourth novel.