The setting is Wales. In the daytime Hector Bebb drives a brewery lorry, but he’s out early each morning for roadwork and every evening he trains for the big fight in the gym above the White Hart.

Abe would have his boxers function as single minded, sexless fighting machines. Hector has everything to make a world-beater, but his disillusioned wife, Millie, suffers frantic consequences, and when Hector returns home after winning the big fight he meets bigger trouble – the crossroads of his life.

Told by a series of interior monologues, the fourteen characters involved in this novel give a vivid and loving picture of the boxing world.

Ron Berry was born in 1920 in Blaen-cwm in the Rhondda Valley, and worked as a miner from the age of fourteen. His first published novel Hunter and Hunted, appeared in 1960 and was followed by Travelling Loaded (1963), The Full-Time Amateur (1966), Flame and Slag (1968) and So Long, Hector Bebb, which appeared in 1970. After a long gap, during which he wrote for television and radio, his last novel, This Bygone, was published in 1996. He died in 1997 and his Collected Stories and autobiography, History is What You Live, appeared posthumously in 1998.