"The Best British Short Stories 2024" (by Nicholas Royle (ed)) (Salt, 2024)

In his intro about PoV, Royle points out that 9 of the stories are in the 1st person, 1 is 2nd person, 7 are 3rd person limited, 1 is 1st and 3rd person, and 2 are multiple 3rd person or omniscient. The magazines that stories are taken from include Gutter, New Statesman, Fictive Dream (3!), and Lunate.

• Stories I can't tell anyone I know (Bhanu Kapil) - 2.5 pages.
• Summer of light (Jonathan Coe) - 1924. Livia, a plain girl, was asked by an artist to sit for him, fully clothed. She was impressed by the honest painting. Later, her best friend is pretty Serafina. She has 2 rich male friends. When they find out that the artist has an exhibition in Venice, they all take the train there. He's entitled the painting "The Ugly Girl." The men laugh. Serafina tries to cheer her friend up. In the evening they see the artist walking with friends. Serafina (probably) pushes him into a canal. (No)
• Manoeuvres (Paul Brownsey) - It's post-Covid Glasgow. Drummond's mother goes to safer Crewe because there might be war. He's 59 and wants to volunteer. His husband (the 1st person PoV) tries various maneouvres to stop him, finally mentioning the people he cares for. While he's in the cellar getting Drummond's rucksack for him, a missile destroys their building. Drummond dies. The narrator continues speculating about their debating strategies, how Drummond never tried to persuade him. What did his final "Okay" mean? (I've seen this style of story before in BBSS anthos - a death/disaster doesn't interrupt a narrator's train of thought. Is 'It flashed on me upon me' a typo?)
• River (Cate West) - She goes for a walk by the river (to get away from him?) She sees a whole city in the river. She's running for the tube. The river is still now, marble. 4 pages
• Where are they now? (Alison Moore) - Miss Haines and a girl meet in a cafe for an interview. Miss Haines was once famous - an actress. After, she returns to her poky flat, thinking about the interview and her life. She had fallen in love with Richard, a famous married actor, stalking him. Years later, in panto, she was seduced by Benjamin, a much younger actor. She had still been living with her mother in her big house with a garden. The panto season over, she'd stalked him too. She phones the girl a few times. She dreams of coming off-stage down a long, dark corridor to her changing room, where her mother, Benjamin, and Richard's son are waiting.
• Inside (Alan Beard) - 1st person PoV. She was married for a year and sometimes pretends to have an 8 year-old son, Craig. Her husband smoked and once wanted to do theology. After marriage, she was with Harry from work. But there were other men too. The women she'd like to be friends with play bridge. One of their sons bullies hers. She steals Harry's 3rd child, bundles him into a boot and planned to hurt him. (How much should we care about how much is true?)
• Low stakes (Ecm Cheung) - 3 pages. Readers die at the end of reading a story. Characters are reborn. So the character does little good deeds hoping to be reborn into a better life.
• Stock (Gynan Jones) - 28 pages. His shop is closing down(?) so he gives carrier bags of goods away to his regular clients. He visits his nan who lives an hour away. He helps Ifan, who's having to sell his animals. Someone lives in a converted chapel. Annie drives a car, Mari's in the back. He's scared about the police. He has locked a grocery delivery man in the back of their van, threatening to kill them. (I think I can learn from this. What's gained from fogging the details? This isn't just delaying facts to add suspense. It's not simple "Unreliable narrator" tactics. Even when we know what's going on, details are withheld. From the start of the piece we suspect that the main character is under strain - "He sat integrated amongst the felled trees". Later, the odd sentence loses clarity - e.g. "Bones of a sudden watery, as if he was unmixing". His thoughts come fast, and not always clearly. In "He waited. Bloomed with heat again. A slight chill immediately meeting the edges of his sweat. His neck vein thick, suddenly. Too small." what is too small? His vein? I had to re-read too much. Is the shop his? Is Ifan his uncle? Is Mari his daughter? Maybe 3 times "I" is briefly used.)
• Headshot (Charlotte Turnbull) - A new assistant starts at the shabby Soho HQ of a media company. The female assistants have male names. They call the new assistant Dave. Against the rules the assistants live in the offices. The male bosses aren't well behaved. The male actor they take on is badly behaved. Dave's line-manager, Francesca, attacks Dave, who ends up in A&E. (I don't think I get it. The HQ is society in microcosm?)
• Friday art club (Kevin Boniface) - How an old widower fills his day - walking the dog, looking over a wall he's not looked over before, chatting to the postman, getting an old airfix kit through the post as a belated birthday gift from his daughter.
• Churail (Kamila Shamsie) - The narrator's mother died giving birth to her. Soon after, his father emigrated to England with him because the mother had become a Churail (a being who traps her ex-husband until he's old). She's told this by her cousin Zainab. When the narrator's 16, investor banker Zainab moves nearby. She's everything the narrator's now rich father wanted the narrator to be. But she gave up her job to help when there were floods in Pakistan. She asked the father for a donation. He said no. She went to their hometown to find that the mother's grave was flooded. She brought back a twig from a peepul tree. The narrator planted it. Years later its roots invaded the water pipes and maybe the house foundations, and the father's foundations too.
• Strangers meet we when (Nicholas Royle) - Stylised language - few commas. Set in 1911. The painter was with a newcomer in her bedroom/studio when her big sister Effie called up. Mrs Blyton's reading someone's journal about a trip through Europe 13 years earlier. When Lola appears she picked up a poetry book. "So they sat on the floor and drank tea still hot and Lola sliced lemon cake still flustered to think Miss Blyton no Enid really was so much the author already found herself divulging as she otherwise very well might not have done that her mother was an author too". Lola's mother has published a book about "Faces and how to read them".
• Lapin à la moutarde (Sonya Moor) - September. France. Pascal is bringing his new girlfriend for a meal that his widowed mother (her 1st person PoV) is preparing. She kept him secret for his first 12 weeks. Her husband was Gerald. His mother-in-law was a strong character. The narrator didn't like Pascal's previous girlfriend. She wants his girlfriend to be the daughter she never had. She wants to pass family traditions/recipes on. She recalls a train trip from Avignon to Switzerland with Gerald's sister Suzette, paid by her mother-in-law. She recalls her mother killing rabbits and kittens. She recalls meeting the rich mother-in-law after Gerald had told his mother about the pregnancy. A rushed marriage would have been uncivilised. The mother-in-law paid for a Swiss clinic. Pascal phones. His girlfriend doesn't eat meat. He says maybe he'll visit next week. The ending is "And I sit. Listening to the rabbit simmering, for a child that won't come."
• Minor disturbances (Cherise Saywell) - In a world where food is bland and the air needs to be filtered, a mother is in a play area with her little son. She loses him, thinks he's out in the fields where there are no pigeons, crows, or gulls, then finds him in the toilet.
• To have a horse (Timothy J Jarvis) - There aren't any horses. He creates one from junk, and says a spell hoping to bring it to life. He used to have moments of oneness with Nature. He starts a fire, falls asleep, and wakes up burning. He puts out the flames. He has a long journey to make.
• The sun is only a shipwreck insofar as a woman's body resembles it (Claire Carroll) - A woman dyes Andre Breton's hair on an unbearably hot day. 4 pages.
• An invocation (Ben Tufnell) - The narrator, a photographer, is giving a talk about his most famous photo - of Dee, a pop singer who disappeared on tour after a Royal Albert Hall concert where a spirit (faintly visible in the photo) seemed to be invoked onstage.
• What business has a horse to look down on me? (Rosie Garland) - A horse follows the low self-esteem narrator around the kitchen etc. Near the end is "And if, just if, I put in all the hard work and thankless slog at sorting out my life, I'd have to stop slamming doors. I'd have to turn around and look the horse in the eye.". 2 pages.
• Cul-de-sac (Kerry Hadley-Pryce) - Jamie and Susan arrive at Susan's parents. Jamie hasn't met them before. The father is unfriendly (and ill?). The house shakes whenever a train passes. The roast dinner's an ordeal. Susan ends up cutting the meal on his plate into little pieces. 6 pages. (After 5 fairly short, non-Realist pieces, here's another piece with rather unbelievable detail. This time the exaggeration is explainable by the fraught state of mind of the main character.)
• A private tutor (Gregory Norminton) - Nessa (Oxford degree) is private tutor for a rich Russian family in London. The kids are Stan (16) and Dasha (7, a girl). Vadim manages security. Nessa takes Dasha to a bothy in a wood near Stirling owned by her family. No ransom is requested. Dasha doesn't mind it at first, but the low standard of food and entertainment gets her down. Vadim learns about the bothy, drives up speculatively, and rescues Dasha. The father had said to Vadim that he could do what he wanted with Nessa. He lets her go. 25 pages.

I don't think I share his Flash tastes, which this year is a problem.

With ever fewer UK paper magazines to select from (does he look at "Stand", "Under the Radar", "Postbox"?) the task of finding stories grows harder. I guess the competition anthologies are good hunting grounds. Maybe it's time to let magazines nominate stories by UK writers (in the way that Best Microfiction etc gets nominations).