Unthology: No. 3 by Robin Jones and Ashley Stokes (Editors)
Unthank Books have brought out their third annual short story 'unthology'. (See what they did there?) The series is described as showcasing the unconventional, unpredictable and experimental which is correct as far as it goes. They omit words that I personally would have included; words like 'refreshing' and 'excitingly different' because, if I needed to be convinced about short stories (and, being a fan, I don't) they would be the clincher. Full review...
My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fictions by Tania Hershman
It's said that the art of short-story writing is totally different from that of novels as the writer only has ten or so pages to accomplish what others do in two to three hundred. Imagine, therefore, telling an entire story in prose conveying depth and meaning in fewer words than this review. It may be difficult but, apparently, not downright impossible as Tania Hershman has nailed it with honours. In fact her first collection The White Road was commended by the Orange Prize judges of 2009. Full review...
One Dog and His Man by Mike Henley
Oberon is a Labrador with a pedigree as long as your arm and One Dog and His Man is his story about what it's like living with the man he generously refers to as The Boss, about life in general and the ways of the world. Think of him as the canine equivalent of the parliamentary sketch writer, there to highlight the idiosyncrasies of human life and bring a gentle humour to situations which might otherwise be taken far too seriously. Before you wonder how this is possible - how a dog can write a book - let me remind you that dogs are very intelligent animals. After all, dogs and their humans might go to what are laughingly called 'dog training classes', but it's the humans who are trained, not the dogs. Full review...
Where Have You Been? by Joseph O'Connor
Irish novelist Joseph O'Connor has had quite a 2012. Earlier in the year he joined the ranks of such authors as Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle and Seamus Heaney when he became a recipient of the PEN award for his outstanding contribution to Irish literature. What could possibly top that for a sense of achievement? Well this, his first book of short stories in 20 years, must come pretty close to at least equalling it, amply illustrating the reasons for the panel's decision. Full review...
The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai
Anita Desai's The Artist of Disappearance is a collection of three novellas with several satisfying unifying features. All are set in modern day India, all involve some looking back in time and all three involve some consideration of the creative art - who it is for, what happens to it once it leaves the artist's control and who 'owns' it. Most of all, each one is beautifully written, with strong characters and evocative descriptions of personal loss. In terms of length each is relatively short - around 50 pages long - but after each one you feel that you've been engrossed in the story just as much as if you had read a novel of more conventional length. Full review...
Bullfighting by Roddy Doyle
I've often wondered what goes through an author's mind the next time they sit down to write after winning a major literary prize. Does it put undue pressure on an author, thinking that they will have to write something equally as good or better next time around? Some writers can wilt under the pressure and future offerings are derided by critics as 'not as good as (insert title here)'. But some thrive under the weight of expectation and continue to write wonderful stories. 1993 Booker Prize winner Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha falls firmly into this latter category. Full review...
Kicking the Hornets' Nest by Gerry Wells
WWII books about the RAF and the Navy are quite common. Books about Special Operations Executive and similar organisations proliferate. Stories about the army are fewer and try as I might I really couldn't think of one which was other than incidentally about tank crew, so when the opportunity came I had to read 'Kicking the Hornets' Nest' particularly as it's written by an author who crewed a Sherman tank in Operation Overlord, back in June 1944. I had just a couple of nagging doubts. It's a book of short stories. Would I find it easy to pick up - and out down again? The big worry was whether or not this was going to be a macho action story, which wouldn't really be my cup of tea at all. Full review...
A Bunch of Fives by Helen Simpson
I will come straight out with it at the top of this review and state that I am a big fan of Helen Simpson. So this book, which is a selection of five stories from each of her five collections, is right up my street. All I’ve got to do now is convince you that you need to read it too! Full review...
Next by Keith Gray
That Keith Gray hangs out with all the cool people, you know. Hot on the heels of one fabulous anthology of short stories all about virginity, Losing It, comes Next. The topic this time is life after death and it's another preoccupation for young people. What's next? What will it be like? How will those left behind manage and cope? Each of the cool people contributes an idea of what death may bring. Full review...
The Crabber Stories by Francis Bennett
John White was known to everyone as Crabber - a nickname which he once earned and which then stuck - and he grew up on the shores of Long Island in the nineteen-fifties. It was a close-knit community and a time when children had more freedom than they are likely to be allowed now. We watch as Crabber grows from being a boy still suffering from the death of his elder brother when we first met him through to a time when he's old enough to go on a hunting trip on the mainland with a local family. He tells his own stories, as truthfully as he can and with the sort of insight which children have before life injects its cynicism. Full review...
All Shall be Well by Stephanie Tillotson and Penny Thomas
Twenty five years - a quarter of a century - is a long time. It's an incredible length of time as an independent publisher, particularly one which specialises in publishing the best in Welsh women's writing, but that's exactly what Honno have achieved. To celebrate the occasion they've published this anthology of twenty five short stories and non-fiction pieces. They've previously been seen in the numerous anthologies published by Honno but when combined they give an interesting and enlightening insight into the work of these great writers. Full review...
The Infernal Republic by Marshall Moore
The Infernal Republic is a collection of short stories containing a mixture of general fiction, horror and fantasy published by Signal8Press, an imprint of author Marshall Moore's own publishing company Typhoon Media Ltd. Now normally I wouldn't pay much attention to who publishes the books I read, but in this case I'm making an exception because I can't honestly believe that any traditional publisher would have put out this book in this form. The whole collection is so badly crying out for a good editor that it actually ended up making me angry in places. Full review...
52FF by Marc Nash
52FF is a collection of short stories in the flash fiction format. If you're new to flash fiction, you should know there are various definitions but here, Marc Nash chooses a format of under 1,000 words. This gives him some leeway and so the pieces are in a wide variety of styles - some experimental - but all of them exploring a single central metaphor and all with a darkness about them which is sometimes explicit and sometimes only emerges after you've had time to think and digest. Full review...
Our Little Secret and Other Stories by John E Flannery
It's over eighteen months since we first encountered John Flannery and his debut collection of shorts stories, Toby's Little Eden. A golf course near Manchester and the characters who populated it came sharply to life and we laughed and we smiled along with them. Things are different in Our little Secret and Other Stories as we encounter violent death, suicide, delusion and mental illness. It's a good read but it's certainly not a comfortable one. Full review...
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret
In the opening, titular story, Keret is forced by several people to create, and alter, a short short story. It's a plain metaphor for the history of Israel, but it proves that this modern Scheherazade is not too far removed geographically from the original. And what follows are probably the sort of short, tantalising, open-ended, rough-round-the-edges and surreal results of being compelled to carry on telling tall tales on a nightly basis. Full review...
One Soul by Ray Fawkes
When reading this it soon becomes very clear we're reading not one, but nineteen, stories. With each page divided into a regular 3x3 grid there are eighteen images on each double page spread, and every one shows an episode, or a beat, of a different character's life in turn, from being a babe-in-arms to death. However, the way they join up - everyone's figurative moment comes at once, at times the artist's heavy black ink makes all eighteen images coincide into one image - proves there is a separate, individual tale around and behind the others, one which will end with the most delightful moral - that the ability to be anything one imagines is in our DNA. Full review...
Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter
'Burning your Boats' brings together Carter's early works and her uncollected short stories, alongside the collections 'Fireworks', 'The Bloody Chamber', 'Black Venus' and 'American Ghosts'. Carter's ability to take the everyday and transform it into the fantastic is evident in stories that range from a cautionary tale of a musician in love with his instrument to a lost motorist whose journey ends in nightmarish circumstances in the Snow Pavilion. Full review...
The Library Book by Anita Anand, Julian Barnes, Bella Bathurst, Alan Bennett and others
I had better begin by saying that I had a vested interest in liking this book since I am a chartered librarian myself and so am wholeheartedly in support of saving our nation's public libraries. But you don't need to be a librarian to enjoy this book. It is rich with anecdotes from some wonderful writers and makes a pleasant read whether you're keen to save libraries or not. Full review...
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod
Short stories may not be everyone's cup of tea. Sometimes, particularly with first time authors, there is an annoying tendency to be overly experimental. Not so with Alexander MacLeod's stunningly assured debut. True he has genetic 'form' in that he is the son of novelist and short story writer Alistair MacLeod, but even so, the quality of this collection, is remarkable. The collection of seven stories is not overly themed, although certain issues and concerns do reappear, but what binds the stories together is a very human approach to adversity. Full review...
Modesty Blaise: Live Bait by Peter O'Donnell
We're back in the gritty yet glamorous world of Modesty Blaise - at least, as gritty and glamorous as you could get in the Evening Standard daily comic strip in the late 1980s. Titan have had a mammoth undertaking to reproduce all the original strips in handy large-format graphic novel compendia, and this latest covers three stories, all of which I consider greater in depth than those in the other volume I've reviewed - Sweet Caroline. Full review...
This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor
The clue is in the Christopher Brookmyre-styled title. If the events, characters and circumstances in these stories are known to you, then you have my sympathies. A man causes an embarrassment trying to watch his daughter's first school nativity play. Another has a phobia of eggs containing an avian foetus when he puts knife and fork to them. There's a car crash here - and there, a drowning, some arson, some theft... and a lot of clues that point to some national disaster. Take all those clues as one and you eventually see this is more than just a collection of disparate short stories, but a very fractured, obfuscated novel. Full review...
Married Love by Tessa Hadley
Married Love is Tessa Hadley’s second collection, containing twelve short stories looking at (mostly) modern relationships and family dynamics – many are about parents and their grown up children and in-laws, others are about couples. Flicking through the book to choose some of the best and/or most interesting stories to mention, I have found a difficulty. Almost all of these incisive, witty stories reveal an interesting group of characters I would like to know more about after the end, sometimes from several different viewpoints, and it is hard to pick out just a few. Full review...
Ladies and Gentlemen by Adam Ross
Adam Ross's characters are driven - but I mean that in the wrong way. They're not the ones riding on a crest of a wave of motivation, steering their course through life. No, instead they are passengers, and who or whatever is at the wheel seems to have lost the satnav. So, in 'Futures', a middle-aged unemployed man finds himself giving life lessons and a kick up the backside to a teenaged neighbour just as his own career seems about to enter its nth phase, with an airy-fairy psychic-oriented company that won't ever go as far as telling him what his job might be. A professor who has to settle temporarily where his work takes him and not where he would like, has to wonder what to do when told of the action-packed adventures of a devil-may-care, come-what-may mechanic. Full review...
While the Women are Sleeping by Javier Marias
The first thing the trivially minded will note is that this is not the complete edition of While the Women are Sleeping, for not all the stories in the original Spanish volume are here. You might think that's because some have been hived off for a future 'best of' compilation. But if this isn't the best of Javier Marias, then I don't know what is. Full review...
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
First things first. There's only one story in this collection about Cold Comfort Farm. This is a story about the farm before Flora Poste arrives, a 'prequel' if you like. It features the Starkadder family at Christmas, with a dispute over a coffin-nail and it did make me smile. I suspect it is one for fans, however. For instance, the appearance of a teenage Dick Hawk-Monitor, already in love with Elfine, shoots a knowing wink at the devoted but would leave most readers cold. Full review...
War: Stories of Conflict by Michael Morpurgo
Throughout history, war has blighted society and had long lasting impacts on not only those directly involved but the innocent bystanders too. This collection of stories, edited by the magnificent Michael Morpurgo himself, looks to explore the impacts of war on individual soldiers, families and especially children. Every story approaches conflicts from a different angle and this ensures that even though there are a good number of short stories in the book, you will never feel as if it is becoming repetitive or dull. The stories do a good job of conveying just how multi-faceted and complex the concept of war is. Full review...
The Tiny Wife by Andrew Kaufman
It all begins with a bank robbery. Only this isn't your typical sort of bank robbery since the robber demands not money but instead each person in the bank must give him the item of most sentimental value that they have with them. These range from photographs and a key through to a calculator...and on taking these items he says he is also taking fifty percent of their souls, and it is up to the victims to find the way to get their souls back, or to die trying. Full review...
The Gloomster by Ludwig Bechstein, Axel Sceffler and Julia Donaldson
We've all been there. Finding fault with everything around us, and perhaps picking on one particular irritant that gets us so rattled, tetchy and narked all we can do is invoke "Hell and damnation!" down on all creation - including, of course, ourselves. After all, our lot is so bad it won't make anything much worse. Full review...
The Man in the Shed by Lloyd Jones
The title is certainly attention-grabbing and I hoped that the book would live up to my expectations. It did. The man in 'The Man in the Shed' is not blessed with a name. His name (whatever it is) is not important or relevant to the tale. It's all about why he's in the shed in the first place. This particular shed's in a garden of a house inhabited by a family which includes the young narrator. It's pretty clear that the marriage is going through a rocky patch right now. So who, you could reasonably wonder, is the odd one out here - the husband or the man in the shed. Jones tells us in his own way. He's a writer who catches your attention early, or he did in my case. No fancy statements or lazy cliches but good old plain English but with flair. Full review...
Alice by Judith Hermann
Alice is a collection of five short stories, linked thematically since they all deal with the subject of death, but they are also linked because the central character, Alice, is the same in each story. So rather than feeling like short stories the book has a hint of the novel to it, yet the stories are never completed or fully told so it's a novel where you're not always sure what's going on. Full review...
The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad
"In the tangle of crumbling, weather-beaten and broken hills, where the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet, is a military outpost…" Thus begins the tale of Tor Baz, the Black Falcon. To this desolate place come two wanderers, a man and a woman seeking refuge.
Refuge is denied them, since it places duties that the fort commander cannot accept, but instead he offers them shelter from the wind of a hundred and twenty days. For as long as they want it. Shelter, and food. Full review...
The Foxes Come At Night And Other Stories by Cees Nooteboom and Ina Rilke (Translator)
There's a bold statement on the front cover from, as it happens, one of my favourite authors, A S Byatt saying that Nooteboom is one of the greatest modern novelists so I thought that I was in for a treat. But I didn't enjoy the first short story. Not the greatest of starts. I was disappointed to say the least and was wondering what all the fuss was about. Then I started to read the story entitled Thunderstorm and things started to pick up. I appreciated the sparse and elegant language. Lines such as 'Five people at an outdoor cafe: two women ... a solitary black man ... a couple at a table nearby. Enough for a film.' How lovely and evocative is that last line, I'm thinking. I read it twice as it was so good. Full review...
Last Fling by Sue Gee
Sue Gee is well known for her novels, but this is her first collection of short stories. Short story collections are not for everyone. I've always enjoyed them since they fit easily into a busy life, leaving you feeling as if you've lived through a whole story in just a short space of time. It's easier to find the time for a quick story sometimes than to sit down with a four hundred page novel! Full review...
In-Flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson
I am always thrilled to see that Helen Simpson has brought out a new book. I am a big fan of her crisp, funny, observant short stories. So I picked up 'In Flight Entertainment' with some anticipation. I was not disappointed. Full review...
Toby's Little Eden by John E Flannery
John E Flannery's debut collection contains four short stories (although one is more of a novella) and a series of amusing sketches about the ground staff at a new Golf Course in north Manchester. They're more varied than they might appear at first glance and demonstrate Flannery's ability to get straight to the heart of the story without wasting words and to develop character as economically as possible, whilst still holding the reader's imagination. I knew as soon as I began The Ghostwriter that I wasn't going to be disappointed as a man who has written successful thrillers is possessed by the spirit of Charles Dickens. It's a neat riff on John Braine's idea that novelist wait for an idea to descend on them and Graham Greene's belief that novelists are like mediums. Full review...
The Sexes by Dorothy Parker
From the young woman who examined her handkerchief in minute detail, to the soldier's leave which didn't live up to expectation, through the thoughts of the early hours of the morning to the actress who proved a disappointment to her fan and on to the glorious culmination of the child who should never have been called Lolita we have five wonderful short stories. They're in a book that's no bigger than most short stories but buy it and it could well be the best buy that you make this year. Full review...
The Kissing Game by Aidan Chambers
You don't see that many short story collections in YA circles. But when they do appear, you often wonder why there aren't more of them. And this is absolutely the case with The Kissing Game. Ranging from short pieces of flash fiction to "proper" short stories, each one will incite, surprise and stimulate. Full review...
The Suicide Run by William Styron
A WW2 naval soldier, guarding a prison island for those found guilty at courtmartials, is forced to wonder if he is winning his own battles against those arriving and leaving. A soldier remembers calming memories, and those causing tension, as he rests up before action. And for a highly-charged young man, there may be too much risk to be found in his high-octane downtime. Full review...
The Vernham Chronicles by John Saunders
Set amidst the rolling British countryside around Vernbury Vale is the little village of Vernham. Anyone who lives in a village will recognise it immediately, with its cobbled streets and Tudor buildings. There was some damage during the war (which might, or might not have been down to a lighthouse folly constructed by a local landowner on his lake) but the gaps have been filled with some beautiful, er, mock Tudor buildings. Almost unique and nearly beautiful as the village is, it's not the star of The Vernham Chronicles. The stars are the people who live in Vernham. Full review...
The Lost Stories of Sherlock Holmes by John H Watson, Tony Reynolds and Chris Coady
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a successful detective character will have far too many cases in his career for it to be at all realistic. The worst case in point are the Hardy Boys, who have had two hundred or more adventures and are still not 20. Slightly more literary, but no less busy it can seem, was Sherlock Holmes, for Watson declaimed many times that he did not write down all that man's exploits. Tony Reynolds here gives us eight more cases, making Holmes' workload even more impressive. Full review...
Perfect Lives by Polly Samson
The eleven short stories in Perfect Lives are about a group of people living in an English seaside town. Each story of challenged relationships, devastating discoveries and objects and people with a history is carefully and beautifully crafted, stands alone and works well in its own right, but the connections between all the stories offer an extra, fascinating dimension. Each story made me want to look at the others again to understand how they all connect, to piece together the different bits of people's lives in each story. This format also offers an opportunity to see some of the characters from several different perspectives, and perhaps make the short stories more satisfying to those who are dissatisfied by their brevity, as some of the same characters reappear, so offering some of the advantages of the novel while staying in the short story form. There are four stories told in the first person by an unnamed woman who is married with two young sons, and then one of her sons has a story of his own (Ivan Knows). There are a variety of narrative viewpoints – women, men, a little boy, a teenage girl, first and third person. Full review...
The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories by Shena Mackay
This volume of short stories, first published in 2008 but new in paperback, has a lot to offer those familiar with Shena Mackay's previous work and readers coming to her stories for the first time, with a generous thirty six stories - thirteen recent stories collected in book form for the first time are combined with twenty three from Shena Mackay's previous collections. Full review...
A Season to Remember by Sheila O'Flanagan
We first meet the Lodge owners, a likable couple. They find running their upmarket country house type hotel both exhilarating and exhausting. The novel is bang up to date so O'Flanagan gets in the whole recession/banker-bashing thing early on. As the festive season looms, the unthinkable has happened. Empty rooms. They're not used to empty rooms, at any time of the year. Normally the Lodge is a full house. But then a slow and steady trickle starts as our characters book in - and the story starts proper, so to speak. Full review...
Rumpole at Christmas by John Mortimer
This book is as slim as one of Rumpole's beloved packets of cigars and it can also be read in the time it takes an average turkey to cook in the oven on Christmas Day. A handful of festive, short stories is covered in this book with its appealing front cover. Most of the stories have been previously published elsewhere, mainly in 'The Strand Magazine' but also in some of the national newspapers. Full review...