"Madame Zero" by Sarah Hall (Faber, 2017)

• "Mrs Fox" won the BBC National Short Story Prize. A childless wife turns into a fox. Her husband (his PoV, 3rd person) tries to keep her in the house, then lets her go. In the wild she has cubs. He visits. It's a well-written piece which doesn't stray from the course it sets off on. Fades at the end.
• "Case Study 2" - written as a report about a child brought up in an alternative life-style commune, the writer a childless woman who finds the task too much of a strain.
• "Theatre 6" - 2nd person. A female doctor has to deal with an emergency miscarriage. Lots of medical detail with geese thrown in to add a literary feel.
• "Wilderness" - I like this. A woman with her boyfriend have moved to S.Africa. With a friend of his they're having a country walk which involves a rickety bridge. She has a panic attack, and isn't happy about how the relationship's going
• "Luxury Hour" - young mother has chance meeting with ex-lover. Minor.
• "Later, His Ghost" - Post-apocalyptic. Norwich? A boy scavenges in a windswept, almost deserted city. An older woman (his ex-teacher) is staying with him, heavily pregnant. Could be the start of a novel.
• "Goodnight Nobody" - A young girl's PoV. A dog has bitten the head off an unattended baby down the road, but the main theme of the piece is the girl's growing up and her attitude to death (her mum works in a hospital mortuary). Rather long, though I liked it.
• "One in Four" - 4 pages.
• "Evie" was shortlisted in the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. A wife experiences disinhibition especially regarding pleasure, the Chekhov gun of her husband's old single friend Richard just waiting to go off. Again, the course of the story has few surprises. Again a husband's third person PoV, and a lack of children. It turns out that she has a benign brain tumour. The change in the friendship between the husband and Richard could have been explored more, and there's scope for investigating how [temporary] personality change might affect "the self" but there's insufficient room to deal with these issues because of all the sex.

"boundary issues" are sometimes mentioned explicitly. Even when not, characters note when behaviour is unconventional. Motherhood's a theme too. Not as knock-out a collection as I was hoping for.

Other reviews

• Kate Clanchy (None of these stories offers any redemption, personal or global: instead, like “Mrs Fox”, they say bluntly, insistently, in Hall’s smooth, clear prose, “Look, this darkness is here.”)
• Lucy Scholes
• Emily Mitchell (Hall’s language is at all times remarkable, moving between evocative lyricism and cool precision as the stories demand. The collection mixes the fantastic, the speculative, and the realistic, and, in general, this works well. But the author’s forays into science fiction are not as successful as her work in other modes. ... Hall is at her best when delving into intense psychological states and powerful emotions.)
• Emily Harrison
• Rachel Swirsky (["Mrs. Fox" and "Evie"] are the strongest in the collec­tion, and most clearly underscore Hall’s recurring themes of alienation, identity, and the impossibility of truly understanding ourselves and others.)