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Griffiths' debut novel about a group of drifters intimately bound together by much more than just their shared lifestyles keeps you in thrall to his prose from beginning to end. Part social documentary, part cautionary tale, this novel is abundant with life as its characters are prostrated by the throes of addiction, excess, and the disenfranchisement amid the aftermath of the Thatcher years. In nearly 500 pages, Griffiths unsurprisingly touches on a wide array of issues such as national identities, class, cultural deracination and material and social precarity, all interrogated by the novel's ensemble of characters.

Grits is a trans-British plurality of voices in which Aberystwyth acts as the symbolic melting pot of cultures. This poses a striking counterimage to that offered by the notion of a monolithic 'Britishness'. One of the things the book is so good at doing is de-homogenising the culturally homogenous Britain so often seen in print and on screen. The demotic speech reflects this and the microcosm of cultural hybridity dictates the text's structure - each character is allocated a chapter and no one voice is privileged over another. Colm, a Liverpudlian of Romany-Irish heritage is fully realised and given as much dutiful consideration by Griffiths as Malcolm, an Essex boy, and Sioned, a native of Aberystwyth. Indeed, that term - 'native' - seems to undergo some scrutiny by Griffiths.

While the incessant raving, drinking, snorting and questing for the next fix adds to the text's entertainment, they really hammer home another point about the characters. The material and social conditions under which they live are expressive of their cultural liminality, their marginal status within Britain's cultural representativeness. Nearly 20 years on since publication, I wish I could say things have improved. Nevertheless, Griffiths breathes life into his characters, their anxieties and philosophical musings. Lazy comparisons to Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting should be resisted. Obviously, the similarities are there, but Griffiths' work is so much more than some vacuous imitation. His is an important voice, illuminating not only Welsh political, social and cultural life with shrewd insight, but those neglected voices all over the British archipelago. Grits is the crucible in which these voices meld and in which something exciting is birthed.