"Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology 7", (2014)

Over 2500 entries. Some familiar names - Tow Vowler and Danielle McLaughlin for example.

• "The art of flood survival" (Mahsuda Snaitch) - Set in Bangladash. First person - an 8 year old girl, a servant who wants to leave. I've doubts about whether such a girl, clever though she might be, could think things like "Mahmud preens and combs his moustache every day. I believe the closest he feels to love is the adoration of that gleaming cockroach."
• "Tata and Mama and Me" (Claire Griffiths) - a little girl (first person) plays games in a concentration camp.
• "Debt" (Tom Vowler) - best so far. I've read it before, in Dazzling the gods.
• "mid-air" (Jennifer Allot) A boy plus little sister go out with separated father and his new girlfriend. Less consistent quality than earlier stories; a more authentic child's voice.
• "Album Review: Thoughts of Home by We Thought We Were Soldiers" (Martyn Bryant) - An essay-like review reveals the reviewer.
• "Terrorism and Tourism" (Chris Edwards-Pritchard) - First-person male repeatedly acts out terrorism in a live-action museum.
• "You can't always get what you want" (Richard Fifield) - Set in a care home. Minor.
• "Days" (Amaryllis Gacioppo) - A daughter's visiting the suicide scene of a long-unstable, unfaithful mother - "Letting go is the hardest part, but once you do, the drowning is easy".
• "The Tower" (Sophie Hampton) - First-person 11 year old girl is taken to the zoo by her Nan. Then she starts shoplifting to stay friends with a boy. She's worried about the old man next door. Not much plot, but the main character's sensitivity emerges.
• "The Stone, The Storm, The End of Huckleberry Finn" (James Hughes) - From a child's viewpoint, we see a family in trouble. Their dog disappears - it was troubling the neighbours. I wasn't keen on the style - "dwelling at numbed length on the kind of immaterial minutiae we dwell on when our heart aches"; "After gazing a curious stretch of time".
• "The Collector" (Sarah Isaac) - A young (first-person) daughter of street-entertainers (acrobats - in the 1800s?) is abandoned by her family, ending up on a care-home. I didn't get the point really, though the details were interesting enough.
• "Beached" (Danielle McLaughlin) - Flash. Didn't get it.
• "Biscuits for Special Occasions" (Keeley Mansfield) - a girl (first-person) from a small care home returns from school to find the place empty and without electricity. While on a train to go to her father a policeman finds her. Too long for what it is - a chapter.
• "The Colour of Mud" (Fiona Mitchell) - a whore deals with several customers, some of them regulars. Atmospheric.
• "Tethered" (Emma Murray) - The world's in environmental decline. Will a mother take a space elevator?
• "A Peacock, A Pig" (Benjamin Myers) - a loner boy on a farm is given a piglet to look after by one of her mother's many male visitors. A girl at school loves peacocks. I like this story - male/female imagery, lone males, hurt pride.
• "Guerilla War" (Paddy O'Reilly) - a family of kids are left to fend for themselves when their mother's taken away in an ambulance. The father's useless so gran comes to check and discipline. She and the 14 year-old boy with a knife don't get on.

• "All is music" (Tannith Perry). The persona arrived in NY at 14 - from Senegal? She's old. She hears old song that are so loud she can hear nothing else. Then it grows louder. No.
• "Nowhere Land" (David Wareham) - refugees arrive at a crowded camp. It's snowing. The daughter misses dancing. No.

An enjoyable collection. The 3 prizewinners (all good) have similarities. Indeed, throughout the anthology there's lots of immediacy, and many main characters to empathise with. There are many children's viewpoints, absent parents, mothers who sleep around. They're stories which would work well on the radio, the one exception being Martyn Bryant's piece. As usual with such anthologies, I've trouble seeing the excellence of 20% or so of the pieces. I think the best of the commended stories were by Edwards-Pritchard and Myers.

"on it's own", "gate our front" and "it's reputation" are typos.