"The illustrated man" by Ray Bradbury (Harper Perennial, 2005)

First published in 1952. In the prologue (which I found promising) a man meets a wanderer who's cursed with skin that shows stills and movies. The wanderer sleeps while the man watches the movies one by one. There are 16 stories. After reading The Veldt, Kaleidoscope, The Other Foot, The Highway, and The Man, I decided to skip the rest. The plots are sometimes ok, always straightforward, often predictable. Ditto the characters. The men generally act like your average guy.

See the Wikipedia page for details.

"Killing in the shadows" by Kate Ellis

An audio book set in York (though it's unnamed).

Little Freya is visited at night by a little girl Anna. Her brother Tom is visited by Jack. Lexi Verity, a TV presenter, is found dead in her swimming pool, stabbed. Her husband's a Lord. Her first husband's a TV actor. He's been paying Lexi's chaffeur and housemaid for information. Nathan Cord, who used to stalk her, has been recently released. Her ex-boyfriend, a chef, has asked her for loan. She's been having an affair with the gardener. Carling, a psychic who Lexi used, has bouts of authenticity that help the police. Sirus, who's making recreations of local murders in a museum exhibition, does an inexact recreation of Lexi's death. A museum worker is the ex of a policeman.

Douglas, the boss of a gambling firm (an ex-cop) is found dead, stabbed. He had a daughter, Izzy (18), out of wedlock. He'd just gone to a solicitor to change his will in Izzy's favour.

There'd been a fire in the house where Freya lives, when it was a pub. A child had died. The father (a widower) had committed suicide. The child's nurse, Matilda Smith, had been sleeping with him. Lexi's housekeeper had found docs and a birth certificate showing that Lexi had been Matilda. Bobby, a half-sister of Anna, is becoming a nun. She realised recently that Lexi might have been Matilda. Lexi had lied to police about Bobby to protect her from accusations of arson.

Penny lives in the house next to Freya's family. She's a solicitor (the one that Douglas saw). She used to be a barmaid in the pub and had a key for it. She fancied the owner. She's lit the fire. She hated Lexi and was worried that her next TV series about crimes would involve her. Douglas recognised her. She's arrested in the museum while she's looking after Freya and Tom.

PoV is quite tightly controlled but only at the expense of people having very expressive eyes, etc - e.g. "Ben thought he could see a knowing look in her eyes". Police are happy to tell suspects (or Lexi's agent) about what other suspects have said. There are many suspects and interconnections between them - much more plot than psychological depth.

Other reviews

• Carol Westron (It is an excellent story, with engaging central characters that depict the police as human and vulnerable, but also caring and decent people. The plot is complex but coherent, with many skilfully laid false trails)
• classicmystery (So many seemingly disparate threads that come together slowly to form a complete picture. Things that seemed irrelevant suddenly becomes part of the main plot, but in a way that makes sense. ... And while there’s a supernatural element in the story, it just enhances the mystery rather than distract from it.)

"She's always hungry" by Eliza Clark (faber, 2024)

• Build a body like mine - A woman who's had weight problems finds that she's losing weight though she's still over-eating. Her female lover advises her to see a doctor. She has a tapeworm. Managed, it solves her problem, thought her partner leaves her. She offers tapeworm eggs online [No - the idea's ok but the execution's rather flat]
• The problem solver - Juliet's been raped, we're told. She wants to tell someone but the only person available is flatmate Oscar. He thinks she should report it. Against her wishes he goes out (Juliet following), finds the rapist in a pub and punches him, knocking out a tooth in front of mutual friends. She starts getting messaged [No. Execution too ordinary]
• She's always hungry - Published in "Granta". It's a mermaid piece with stronger-than-usual SF/alien/coming-of-age overtones. [Yes. The world-building's unobtrusive. Could be a first chapter. The content guide says that "it takes place in a matriarcal village, where men are heavily subject to gendered repression and systematic violence"]
• The shadow over little Chitaly - Online reviews of a half-Italian, half-Chinese takeaway [No]
• Hollow bones - 33 pages. Min wakes in an alien craft. The rest of her crew died while at a dig on a distant planet. She has a leg wound which puzzles the alien, friendly Dr Noah. She drifts in and out of consciousness, thinking her mother is still alive. To complicate matters further, her translator's on the blink. Fen is beside her. Her wound is luminous blue, When she touches it, her hand develops blisters. Fen and Min distrust Noah - is Min being used as an experiment? They get a ship to collect them. Min has her leg and hand amputated. Then she notices a blue luminesence in her mouth
• Goth GF - The narrator who works in a bar has a female Goth co-worker who criticises colleagues' make-up and taste in music. She self-harms. On Instagram she has rude selfies and a big following. The narrator (who late in the story is revealed to be male) fancies her - she's doing a Ph.D. He gets tattoos like hers. She bluntly rejects his offer of a date. He gives her his tips as long as she continues to belittle him.
• Extinction event - Earth is dying. Some plant/animals are brought back from a distant plant. They breath chlorine, eat microplastics, and exhale oxygen. The narrator looks after them and works out how they reproduce. When they're transplanted, the Earth improves, but the beings die from disease and grieve for each other. The narrator doesn't think this is moral.
• Nightstalkers - California. Keith tells his mother that he doesn't want to continue school. He wants to start a band with friend Tommy and get a girl vocalist. He and Tommy sneak into unlocked houses and take things. Tommy has a new girlfriend Rainbow who wants to try acid. Keith and her try some. He drifts off on a high. Tommy finds him in a house. They start making out. They run off back to Rainbow when the owner threatens them with a gun. Keith's happy.
• Shake well - The female narrator, 15, has bad acne and older boyfriend Kyle, a minor drug dealer. She squeezes and squirts until she buys an online remedy that seems to work fine. But her face becomes brittle, it cracks and bits come off. It can be mended. She'll made do. [Not much of an ending]
• The king - The narrator is in a phone-selling company. Shauna, a colleague, isn't impressed by him. He killed and ate his father. He eats only humans. He's working his way through Roy at the moment, who's tied up in the narrator's home. Roy is a seer. He predicts the end of the world in 63 days. The narrator prepares. There's mutually assured destruction. He sleeps for 100 years, wakes to become leader of survivors who live in a theme park. He teaches them technology and farming. He expands his power. Shauna appears with her band of followers. The narrator turns out to be a female. The narrator wants to mate with Shauna rather than humans, to create a master race. 30 years later Shauna's taken control. She cuts the narrator's head off but because she doesn't eat him, he regenerates, swimming to the continent and starting a new group, planning to conquer Shauna's tribe.
• Company man - Dora's father works for the party. She's on probation. She used to be Marti. Through the story she compares her (Dora's) reactions to those Marti would have had. She has a recurring, progressing dream involving a red tent. A man from the water board dates her. She lies that she's a widow but was lonely before that. He says his young son died and then his wife died of cancer because she didn't want treatment. They start having frequent sex. She dreams that she reaches the tent, that inside there's a cabaret. The emcee gives her a knife and there's a baby. The man says he's been searching for her - she killed his son and because of her father's connections was able to start a new life with a new identity. He strangles her. She dreams that at the cabaret she's put in a cage and sees the others have fun. [Without the dream sequences this would have been passable, readers speculating about Dora's past, and her attempt to forge a new self - another SF piece? The dreams add a layer of interpretation.]

The content guide (i.e. trigger alerts) is over 2 pages long. One entry says "The shadow over little Chitaly" contains extensive descriptions of food.

After a weak start there's impressive variety - Keith's high in "Nightstalkers" is nothing like Min's drugged confusion in "Hollow bones". There's variety also in the plot/character balance. In pieces like "Extinction event" the plot summary tells you the piece's purpose. In "Nightstalkers", though a lot happens, it's Keith's thoughts about his future life that are significant. All stories involve people who can't be trusted. Gender is pretty fluid. I'm not impressed/disturbed by the humour or horror in the way that the reviewers are. Yes, there's cannibalism but it's not gratuitous.

Other reviews

• Yagnishsing Dawoor (Clark is a bona-fide queen of body horror, sadistic in her choice of imagery. ... The title story, set within a matriarchal community with strict rules for its men – fishers vulnerable to the dark call of the sea – is a delectable, code-scrambled mermaid tale that plays with ideas about male and female power (“The machinations of men had done so little for this place, and for the world outside of here”) and adds a mischievous twist to notions of communal safety and female self-sacrifice. It comes swaddled in influences, from Andersen’s fairytale to Orkney folklore and Lovecraftian mythos ... The King satirises the “femgore” subgenre with which Clark has been identified, dramatising its excesses while relishing its cliches)
• Emily Fletcher (Clark addresses sensitive topics with a humour that doesn’t feel dismissive. Instead, her approach is both relatable and, surprisingly, comforting, striking a balance that acknowledges the seriousness of these issues without losing her unique, and comedic voice. ... ‘The Shadow over Little Chitaly’ is the story that stood out to me the most – This story was extremely laugh-out-loud worthy.)
• Ian Mond (“The Shadow Over Little Chitaly” is easily one of the funniest stories I’ve read in years ... Equally funny, but with lashings of cannibalism and gore, is “The King”, my favourite piece and one of three science fiction stories in the collection.)
• Emily Goulding (My personal favourites were ‘The King’ and ‘Shake Well’, as well as the outstanding ‘The Shadow of Little Chitaly’)
• thefictionfox

"A quiet death in Italy" by Tom Benjamin

An audio book

Dan (English) works in Bologna as a private detective for the firm run by "Commandante" (an Italian ex-policeman). Before long Dan will be boss. He has a 13 y.o. daughter Rose. His Italian wife (daughter of the commandante) died 3 years before. An old anarchist, Paulo Solitudine, has been found dead in the river. He'd disappeared after a police raid on their squat. The mayor's wife Marta (who lectures about Marx) called the firm for help because she's suspicious of her husband's role in Paolo's death - she'd been having an affair with Paulo. Her husband (Carlo Manzi) has been more attentive to her recently. And a mayoral election is a month away. Dan finds that he's giving money to a pregnant woman, that he's keen on removing the red tape on city development, and has been dealing in property. Dan discovers a passage from Paulo's flat to the river. Paulo's lover Delores finds a notebook in his flat, which she passes to Dan. It's a diary going back to 1979, the time when Paulo, Carlo and Marta were socialist friends. The police take Dan in for questioning, taking his SIM card. They talk to his boss, explaining that they want stability.

We get extracts from Paolo's notebook. He and Marta had slept together (so why had Marta denied it?). Carlo had pointed a gun at him, then himself. The revolutionary group had been short of money so Paulo had been part of a group planning to steal some money. He'd got 7 years for it.

Marta asks him for an urgent meeting. Her husband and the chief of police are there. Having realised that Paolo knew about their property dealings, Carlo and Marta had schemed a revival of Paolo's affair with Marta to keep him quiet. Marta hadn't known about Carlo's affair and had been worried when Paolo died. She'd enjoyed the attention she'd been getting from Paolo. Dan wonders if she's being forced into this and offers her protection.

The commandante, the current head of police, and Dan talk. The police pension fund was dirty money, funding the mayor campaign (he'd been an informer for years). The commandante's firm may have got start-up money from the same source. "We are family," the commandante tells Dan.

At Paolo's funeral there's a protest. At the anarchist's urban farm, "Death of an Anarchist" is performed. The police raid, burning the place down. Dan ends up in an abandoned building with the head of police and a policeman, his subordinate, who he kills. He threatens an anarchist who's been working for him, saying he'll frame him for the policeman death if he doesn't continue working for him. Dan accepts the situation. He ensures that incriminating parts of the notebook are published in time for the election

In the printed book the diary extracts are in italics. In the audio version the distinction between extracts and main narrative is less clear. There's quite a lot about the sights and history of Bologna, which I didn't mind. The view of the Bolognese about themselves and other Italians might be unfair. I like how allegiances are complex. Old and young anarchists aren't always allies. Police and criminals may work together against the destabilising anarchists. I like the set piece of the funeral. I don't so much like "an audible gasp"

Other reviews

• Sylvia Maughan (On first reading, it was difficult to get a clear picture of the plot. This may have been due to the way in which much of the information comes through dialogue. The dialogue itself seems clear and very authentic, but it masks the information that is needed to understand the plot. In some places it is the speed of the storytelling that causes the difficulty.)

"Granta 163: Best of young British novelists" (Granta, 2023)

Extracts from the work of 20 novelists under 40 - about 5 men. I know of Eleanor Catton, Saba Sams and Eley Williams. The introduction by Sigrid Rausing (a judge) roughly categorizes the writers -

• affection for the local - Thomas Morris, Saba Sams
• make meaning of hard lives - Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Natasha Brown
• displacement and alienation - Olivia Sudjic, Lauren Aimee Curtis, Jennifer Atkins, Anna Metcalfe, Eliza Clark
• experimental - Eley Williams, Derek Owusu, Sara Baume, Graeme Armstrong, Sarah Bernstein
• defying categorisation - Eleanor Catton
• what is love - K Patrick
• historical - Isabella Hammad, Tom Crewe
• speculative - Sophie Mackintosh
• deadpan, experimental, alienation - Camilla Grudova

Re the judges -

• Rachel Cusk "talked about writers' ability (or failure) to control and transcend their own material"
• Tash Aw "questioned how far we should privilege a text's internal sense or logic"
• Brian Dillon "noted the slightly caressing, watery feel of many of the novels on the shortlist, and the hard singularity of others"
• Helen Oyeyemi "(the judge among us perhaps most committed to fiction testing the boundaries of convention) was also interested in whether the writer succeeded in evoking curiosity in the reader"

Armstrong's piece about gangland activity (drugs, blades) is written "in dialect" without restricting itself to one register - "The internal revealed itself in the level ae substance abuse, isolation n suicide"; "we got ready fur T in the Park the-gither n bounced on a bus wae aw the GYT wans"; "Drug-inspired delusion or Christmas epiphany, A cannae say fur sure but everyhin changed fae that night on"

Jennifer Atkins' extract has this - "I found a taxi without trouble - Annie had promised there wouldn't be trouble. Earlier that month she'd invited me to come for dinner, the last weekend of the summer, for reunion of sorts at her and Edward's bungalow. She had spoken, drolly, about the meadows and the fields in their part of the country, and the drollness with which she'd spoken didn't match the sight of the late-flourishing land I saw from the taxi window. The sight from the window didn't match anything". Note the chaining together of sentences, the linking by repetition of "trouble", "droll", and "window".

Sara Baume writes "She has been ten for a month and she does not like it. She carries the weight of her extra digit like a chain-mail vest. She hunches her shoulders as if recoiling from the cold metal."

Eliza Clark's piece has atmosphere. It's a mermaid piece with stronger than usual SF/alien/coming-of-age overtones.

Tom Crewe's piece, unlike several of the others, is a self-contained story. I like it, especially the plot. Charles and another man in his 60s are invited to an exhibition of recently-dead Soutine's paintings. They were both his models, both working for a time at the same hotel. They compare how they've changed (Charles only a little). Neither recalls the other, though the other one recalls Charles's wife-to-be, a room-maid. Charles and the room-maid had opened a shop together, then divorced childless. They haven't met for 20 years. Home from the exhibition's opening he writes her an invitation to the show.

Saba Sams' "Gunk" is maybe my favourite piece.

"Blue, babe" by Shagufta K. Iqbal (Nine arches press, 2026)

I don't get it. I'll await reviews with interest.

"Literary landscapes" by John Sutherland (ed) (Elwin Street Productions, 2018)

Settings of dozens of novels are written about in this book. Sometimes there are paintings by (or admired by) the writers, sometimes maps. Authors range from Jane Austen (Bath) to Eleanor Catton (New Zealand) and beyond.

Some of the settings attract fans. There's Bloomsday, and SF fans trace the route of Wells' Martians from Woking to Primrose Hill. I've visited several of the locations, though I didn't feel close to all of them. The ones I most identified with were Manzoni's Lombardy, Hardy's Dorset, Joyce's Dublin, and Strindberg's Stockholm Archipelago.

Misc notes -

• "Anne of Green Gables" is described as a "chosen one" narrative (a term I'd forgotten). In such texts, only one person can put a magical world (Oz, Wonderland, Narnia, Hogwarts) right. But Avonlea could be real.
• For Hardy, there's a map showing the real or fictional names of places. Portsmouth (where I grew up) keeps its name. Swanage (where my mother was born) is Knollsea. He renamed Wareham (my father's birthplace) Anglebury, after a pub that my grandfather must have frequently visited.
• Daphne du Maurier saw an abandoned estate called Menabilly and used it in "Rebecca" as Mandalay. When Hitchcock's film made her rich she bought the estate, but her children disliked living in it.
• "Arturo's Island" (Elsa Morante) is "Considered by many as one of the finest Italian novels of the twentieth century". Oops. I've not heard of it.

"Limberlost" by Robbie Arnott

An audio book.

Tazmania. Ned was 5, living in Limberlost, when his mother died. Only his sister Maggie, the eldest of the 4 siblings, remember her. When it's rumoured that a mad whale had been attacking boats at the river mouth at dusk, his father takes him and his brothers there, showing them the reef that drunk sailors used as an excuse. A huge whale surfaces by the boat. Ned would never forget its huge eye. 10 years later, his brothers at war, he's catching/shooting rabbits, selling their pelt to the army, saving up to buy a boat. He accidentally traps a Qual (a wild cat). He cares for it, keeping it secret from all but Callie, his friend's tomboy sister. He buys a boat, mends it, takes Callie on it.

When the cat's ready to be released, he and Callie take it on the boat to a forest. When he finishes the boat, people visit to admire it. There are hints that the farm is in financial trouble. He gets an offer for the boat. He take it one last towards the river mouth but the weather's bad. He sells it. Callie finds it wrecked by the road - there'd been an accident after it was collected. He visits it, overwhelmed by sadness - his cat gone, his boat gone, his brothers gone. He reads his mother's favourite novel, the one that she called the orchard after. He wonders whether the grief about the boat will ever turn to happy memories. At the end of summer his oldest brother returns. Looking back after a lifetime, it will seem his life's most overwhelming moment, surpassing even the moment when his wife died.

He marries an unnamed wife (Callie). They live on a farm - he knows about orchards, she about the rest. He travels to the Lake District (UK) as a rep of the orchard collective (!) to learn about a new spray. He sails on Lake Windermere. His mother loved the lakes - "was he drifting on a mirror that once held her reflection? The spray helps make the farm a success but there's a hint that it causes his wife's later cancer when his girls are little. He visits his 2 elder girls when they're at university. They ask if he had ever thought of returning his land to its real owners. He wants to tell them about the boat, the river. He means to tell them the cancer has returned. The orchards of the area have been converted to vineyards. He has grandchildren. At his 90th birthday he feels profoundly loved, profoundly alone.

The order of events presented above is little like the order in the book. In the first section we get a summary of his first 20 years. In the final paragraph we're told that his wife died, that he lived beyond 90. The book starts slowly, the key symbols gradually accumulating significance - especially given that there are no death scenes. He returns to the episode of the wild cat throughout his life, telling his young children about it. He's caring and considerate. That summer he cared for the cat and the boat. He befriended his wife-to-be. He learned how to love and lose. By the end, the book's moving, though the UK trip seems odd.

Other reviews

• Imogen Dewey (Arnott’s writing of the natural world is elegiac and elemental, capturing its out-of-kilter ferocity: a place of beauty but not peace ... Arnott, I think, isn’t sentimental. Ned’s failures and errors aren’t presented as moments of transformation or growth. They are allowed simply to stand, as part of the whole.)
• Melissa Harrison (Arnott has an eye and an ear for description that can elevate otherwise quiet moments to something genuinely transcendent: “He resumed walking through Limberlost, his father’s orchard, the rabbit swinging stiff in his hand. Smoke hazed from the house’s chimney. Apple trees in a nearby paddock had taken on the glow of dawn. At Ned’s back the river shone, teal blinking into slate and cerulean, revealing a greater truth of colour.” That is, by any measure, a gorgeous paragraph ... It’s a lovely read for anyone who enjoys descriptive writing, but would be more compelling with some tightening up of the nuts and bolts of storytelling: plot, pace and point of view. We’re told Ned really wants a boat, and this goal is what the first third of the book moves us towards, but we never really feel his need or fully understand why it takes this form. An inciting incident in which his father takes all three boys to see a supposedly mad whale lingers in Ned’s memory, but its meaning remains confused even as more details emerge ... When Ned falls in love, his partner remains unnamed until close to the novel’s end; it’s a gamble that doesn’t pay off, rendering an already rather sketched-in female character even less real without adding any much-needed narrative propulsion. ... Many of the details of a trip to the English Lake District, populated by flat-capped “West Anglians” and their collies, are likely to make British readers wince. Limberlost is told in a closeup third person; this allows for limited departure from the main character’s experience – usually for scene setting – but here isn’t handled consistently enough. Episodes are described in vivid detail that Ned doesn’t witness)

"Granta 68: Love stories" (Granta 1999)

• Call if you need me (Raymond Carver) - Dan (his first-person) and Nancy have a son Richard about to go to college. They've each had recent affairs (he with Sue). Richard goes to stay with his grandmother while Dan and Nancy go to a rented cottage for the summer to save their marriage. On the first day they see a hummingbird, decide to fish and to get a dog. But by evening she thinks it's hopeless. She wants to see Richard and her mother. She goes to bed. When he sees a herd of white horses in the front garden he calls her. She's as awed as he is. They have a good night and sleep together. Next morning he gives her a lift to the airport. Dung and hoofprints are in the front garden. He phones Sue.
• Habibi (Ruth Gershon) - 45 pages. Hannah (a nominal jew) works as a lecturer in London. She has grown children. She lives alone. On a stay in Tel Aviv she starts living with Yussuf, an Arab. The sex is good. The jew/arab mix complicates social/admin activity. She misses him when she returns to London for the term. He doesn't reply to letters. She goes back. They argue. They make up. She realises how lazy he is. She leaves him for good. [Given the length, doesn't do enough]
• Famous people (Orhan Pamuk) - 1958. A couple plus their 2 young sons (one the first-person PoV) live in Istanbul. "Staring out of the window was such an essential habit that when television finally did arrive, people started watching it as if they were still looking outside". The boys collect cards of famous people from bubble gum packs. The persona catches his father trying to secretly leave - to Paris he says. The mother asks her mother if they can live with her. She refuses. The persona loses most of his cards in a game with his brother.
• Fit mother (Peter Ho Davies) - America. She and Bill were addicts. When she got pregnant, she stopped. When she had the baby, social services took him away saying she had 6 months to prove she was a fit mother. She went to collect her mother from far away, bringing her back to help. They hadn't met for years. Bill's arrested for selling drugs. The social worker's impressed by how she's turned her life around but says that her mother's dangerously senile. So she takes her mother back to where she has friends.
• Then and now (Daniel Meadows) - Rephotographing "ordinary" people photographed 25 years before as part of a project [Non-fiction]
• Exchange of pleasant words (Aleksandar Hemon) - The Hemon family trace their ancestor back to the Bible and Iliad. The family-council organise a "Hemoniad", inviting a lost branch of the family, the Hemuns. Videod for posterity.
• Uncle Ed (Keith Fleming) - The author when 16 went to live with his uncle, the openly gay author Edmund White. [Non-fiction. An interesting and entertaining read.]
• Going abroad (W.G. Sebald) - He goes to Vienna, having lived 25 years in England. He wanders all day, thinks he sees Dante. He spends a day with an old friend who'd been institutionised for decades. Then he catches a train to Venice. He gets a train to Verona. He thinks he's being followed. He escapes to Innsbruck. The piece includes graphics - photos, tickets, receipts.
• The furnace (Lydia Davis) - A married daughter, emotionally constrained, tries to communicate with her ailing father. They discuss their furnaces. He sends her crime cuttings from his local paper.
• Closer (David Malouf) - 6 pages. Amy, 9, belongs to a strict pentacostal family. Uncle Charles, from Sydney (Sodom) isn't allowed close. She dreams about him. [Not for me. Too much is about pentacostal oddness]
• Asking for it (James Hamilton-Paterson) - 4 pages. A British man is gang-banged by 5 Arab men in Libya. He didn't report it to the embassy or the police. He thinks it was more a political than an erotic act. [Non-fiction?]
• First cut (Jonathan Kaplan) - About becoming a South African surgeon during apartheit. His first patients were rioting students. It was difficult trying to be a neutral doctor. [Non-fiction]

"Weirdo" by Sara Pascoe

An audio book. The narrative is interrupted by school reports, letters about her debt, etc.

The narrator Sophie, 32, works as barmaid in Essex. Chris, an ex-colleague who she fancied, comes in with a girlfriend, Ella (who's in a relationship with Steve). Sophie hasn't seen him for 3 years. When Chris went to Australia she'd followed him so she could bump into him by chance - after which nothing happened except a kiss. Partly because of that holiday she's over £10k in debt. She says wacky things to mates which they laugh at because they think she's making them up.

Her father's in Australia, evading taxes. She currently lives with Ian who fears her sexuality. It's not love. She used to live with James who got her pregnant. She had an abortion. James is about to marry her sister Dayna. On New Year's Eve, Chris is at her bar. He takes her home. When they have sex he tries to be considerate. It doesn't work. He mistakes her cries of pain as excitement. She discovers he's soon to marry his Australian boyfriend. In the days after she feels she's finally achieved her aim. She discovers she's pregnant. She's happy. She thinks destiny has planned things that way. She miscarries. She leaves Ian. Ella (who Chris exploited the same way he exploited Sophie) leaves Steve and as sex with women.

3 themes emerge -

• She has disassociation issues, feeling that her character isn't part of her, etc. She thinks she could be an experiment, a brain in a jar, and "not even the most important brain in the jar". She read Camus' "The Stranger". She thinks she may be a non-violent psychopath. At school she was clever but caused trouble, having fantasy/reality issues. She tries to show the emotions that people expect. Ian blames it on her cold mother. When Sophie's pregnant she feels that the baby is taking her over.
• She thinks she's a twin, lacking a spiritual partner as in Plato. She sees Dayna or Ella as her twin.
• Destiny: fate works in mysterious ways.

I like -

• She has an idea of marketing Smart Scissors - scissors that won't let the user cut their own hair if they currently have low self-esteem.
• She says that some films are much sadder the second time around - it hurts to see the characters oblivious to the trouble ahead.

The internal monologue is too mundane and needs editing. As a psychological profile it fails - it needs to be more forensic. If she falls in love with men who love her because she wants to be loved (self-validation), then the Chris obsession is odd, and her response strange. As comedy it's not funny enough.

Other reviews

• Ella Risbridger (There’s a touch of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time here; plus, perhaps, a very funny, candid smattering of Louise Rennison’s beloved teen diarist Georgia Nicolson. Pascoe has written about her adolescent love of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, and it’s not hard to draw the line between his naive, careful philosopher Sophie and hers. If you combined those three teenagers, and aged them up 15 years, you might find something of her narrator’s pure, strange tone.)
• Hephzibah Anderson (Just how far from “normal” is Sophie? Her paranoia suggests she’s not merely kooky but needs real help, and this can make for uncomfortable laughter.)
• Annie Kapur (I would definitely call this book a failed attempt at stream-of-consciousness because none of it really comes together. ... I know she states that she wants to keep these things for her future biographer because she is a narcissist, but I cannot help but think that these debt letters do nothing for the overall story. She tells us she is in debt many, many times, we do not require actual physical proof of that. ... I genuinely don't care about her dating life because her professional life is so badly put together I cannot fathom how anyone can stand her even as a friend, let alone a romantic partner.... All in all, I found the characters of this book simply too insufferable to read. It wasn't funny but it was faux-quirky and got tired very quickly.))

"Ripening: NFFD 2018 anthology" by Santino Prinzi and Alison Powell (eds) (Gumbo Press, 2018)

The National Flash Fiction Day anthology with the theme "Food". Flash and a few micros.

Favourites were "Famous last meals" (Nan Wigington), "Milk and Eggs" (Megan Giddings) and "Attack of the Robot Grannies" (Angela Readman)

"Mouth to mouth" by Antoine Wilson

An audio book.

The narrator is a married American father. He's on his way to Berlin where his publisher is trying to make him into a cult author. Waiting for a delayed plane he bumps into Jeff who he knew at college. Jeff's monologue takes over. 20 years before he saved a man from drowning. After, he tracked the man, Francis, down and found that he was a rich art-dealer who'd married an artist, Alison. Francis wasn't a nice person - he exploited customers and staff. Jeff got a job at Francis's gallery. He dated Chloe before finding out that she was Francis's daughter.

Jeff says he has 3 galleries, including one in Berlin.

When it was revealed that Francis was having an affair with an art student, Francis organised a European skiing holiday - he and Alison, Jeff and Chloe. He got Jeff to help him win Chloe over. Chloe resented this. Francis (a good skier) took Jeff (who struggled) to a very steep descent. Francis collapsed, and Jeff continued down to get help. Francis was dead when the rescue team arrived. Jeff married Chloe and took over the business.

When the narrator reaches Berlin, he finds that he doesn't have much of a chance as an author. He checks on Jeff's story, which seems true except that reports say that Francis died because he was hit by a skier.

It's a short novel. I like the phrase (not original) "Like God in plain clothes". The narrator barely features - I'm unsure why it needs to be a framed stor. The given reasons for Jeff telling his story are unconvincing. When Jeff was questioned after the skiing incident what did he say? Seems like I like the book a lot less than others do.

Other reviews

y

• Anne Logan (I became frustrated by Jeff’s ramblings, and I wanted to know more about our narrator. But once I realized the narrator is irrelevant and the whole point of the story is Jeff’s weird experience, I settled into the story. ... These subtle observations about each character (everyone but the narrator) brilliantly uncovers the life of the internal; all the critical elements of this story happen beneath the surface.)
• John Gu (At every moment, in Wilson’s story, the reader is ready to rush onward to find what will happen next. This makes for great readability, but what is gained in speed is sometimes lost in depth. The novel suggests more than it can flesh out in its 200 pages, and though Wilson spares us red herrings, false starts, and dead ends for the most part, you can see that there are some diversions he could have taken to give us a more complete picture of the world he has constructed.)
• Carr Harkrader

"Granta 148: Summer fiction" (Granta, 2019)

• The spread (Ben Lerner) - At an interscholastic debating competition, teams use a tactic to "spread" opponents, introducing many issues as fast as they can. It's taken over from standard debating, as it has in the real world. Senator Bob Dole hands out the prizes. The final paragraph begins with "Now I am going to show you a picture and I'd like you to make up a story about it. We call this the Thematic Apperception Test or TAT. A story with a beginning, a middle and an end."
• Innards (Magogodi oaMphela Makhene) - A black South African dies. We get the tribal history - choosing abattoir hearts; rusty bicycles, etc.
• The Line (Amor Towles) - In the last days of the final Tzar, peasant Pushkin and his wife, childless, move to Moscow to join the revolution. She progresses in a factory. He gets sacked and spends hours queuing for food. He's good at it, enlisting help from about a dozen boys. He queues from someone wanting an exit visa and ended up, after 18 days with a pass for him and his wife to New York. His wife looks upon it as a way to spread Communism. When they get there she goes to a factory, leaving him. He queues at a soap kitchen.
• Quantum Displacement (Nuar Alsadir) - 3 pages of left-aligned prose that uses "^" and " " instead of punctuation. There's a margin note too. [No]
• Longshore drift (Julia Armfield) - Alice and Min, both 17, sell ice-creams from a van. Neither have had friendships with boys though they're probably straight. A group of boys flirt with them as they get ice-creams, not paying. They swim together among basking sharks - scary but not dangerous.
• Charles Parker plays Bossa Nova (Haruki Murakami) - The narrator wrote a spoof music review for a student magazine. 15 years later in New York he sees the record. He doesn't buy it because at $35 dollars it's too much. Next day he goes back. The shop assistant says the record was never there. Then the narrator dreams that Parker thanks him. [No]
• Field notes on a marriage (Te-Ping Chen) - In the states, a male lecturer born in China suddenly asks to marry a female lecturer he's become friends with. They visit her parents who still live on an alfalfa farm. He doesn't want to take her to his boring Chinese town. He hasn't been home for years. He's rather detached. He tells tells her that at his school in China, a clever, poor boy died when a prank went wrong. 2 years into their marriage he hasn't made much academic progress. He hangs himself. She visits his parents, who hint that their son was the killer. On the way back to the airport they pass a block of flats due for demolition. The tenants are refusing to leave. Neighbours are bringing them food.
• Providence (Sara Majka) - 3 pages. In New York a single mother (the first-person narrator) becomes friends with a man whose wife has left him, taking their daughter. When the wife returns, the man gives the narrator up. [No]
• Good Progress (Jem Calder) - The narrator's mother's just been told that her breast cancer is terminal. The narrator (who's generally inhibited) hasn't told their friends, not even their flatmate Roos. "For motives that remained predominantly unclear to me, I had ...", "for no reason that I could have explained if called upon to do so ...". They go to a party. They think about telling people
• Visitors Welcome (Thomas Pierce) - A church buys a Jesus AI hologram. It challenges the congregation to be better christians, then somehow walks away.
• Vows (David Means) - The narrator's married to Sharon and has a son Gunner. They've both been unfaithful. They decide, after much discussion, to renew their vows and have a second honeymoon in Dublin. He thinks that much of what he's done is cliché. At the end it's a year since he held Sharon's hand as she died in hospital. [There are many flashbacks and flashforwards - e.g. "On the night of the party, months after the ceremony, Ted's loss of his son in Iraq was five years away, still up in the vapors, and he had no idea that it was ahead of him, and I had no idea that someday I'd look back and see both of us as we'd be years later and filter our relationship through that particular moment"]
• Schenectady (Adam O'Fallon Price) - Allison Blakely, the narrator, is in Schenectady teaching screenwriting to gifted high-schoolers, telling them how characters [i.e. herself] must change. The text is addressed to David, her ex. She's middle-aged, childless, and into drugs. Leonard, 13, invites her to dinner with his nearby gran. She takes the class to a shopping mall to do observation. High, she buys a remote-controlled helicopter. A few days later he shows her his screenplay about a women with an alien insid her. She asks if it's about her. He says yes, a little - his mother has problems too. She takes him on a night walk to a waterfall and shows him how to control the helicopter, which hovers like magic. [I like the symbolism and much of the story. I think there needs to be a stronger reason for buying the helicopter]

I like "Vows" most. "The line" does less than a story that long should. The other stories are mostly interesting enough.

"An honest man" by Ben Fergusson

An audio book.

Ralf is a geography lecturer, a parent. He grew up in cold war West Berlin. His mother was English, a psychologist working from home. His friends were Stefan, Petra and Maike (his girlfriend). His brother Martin is 4 years his junior. Ralph likes girls and (secretly) boys. He fancies their neighbour Tobias. He thinks Tobias is having sex with his mother. When Ralf's about to go to university he's befriended by Oz, 22, whose Turkish father is their landlord and runs a bookshop. Oz is an informant for the West. He's interested in Tobias (who he claimes is a spy for the East). Oz thinks that Tobias might be looking through Ralf's mother's files about her patients with sex problems (some from the British Army) so they can be blackmailed.

Ralf stays a night or so with Oz. Ralf's besotted. He passes for university but says he's going to take a gap year. Maike breaks up with him. He steals some of his mother's files for Oz. Oz begins to panic, thinking the Stasi are onto him/them - photos of the two of them together are left in his flat.

Oz and Ralf are attacked by Oz's brother and father. Ralf goes to Petra and tells her about Oz. When he gets home, Oz's brother and father are there. They say that Oz is psychotic and doesn't always take his drugs. When Ralf tells them about the espionage, his father says it's not the first time. Oz is taken to a clinic. A woman phones Ralf, saying she's engaged to Oz.

Oz disappears. Ralf realises he's taken a year off for nothing. He gets a shoebox of souvenirs from Oz's father, studies them for clues. It's 1989. His friends leave for university. Something in the shoebox makes Ralf wonder if his father is a Stasi spy. He challenges his father. Maike's mother dies. At the wake his mother appears and reveals that his father made her into a Stasi informant (they were in love, she was a socialist). They'd known what had been going on all the time. His father had had the photos taken. At that moment the wall falls. He goes to see what's going on. Oz is there. When he returns to his family they're about to leave for East Germany. They all go in the car until stopped by the police - Martin had phoned them. His parents are arrested. His father dies at 50.

Years later, Maike, Petra and Stefan attend his wedding.

I liked most of it - pacing was ok, and the facts about Berlin life were interesting. Sex/spy secrecy merges. Ralf was too head-over-heels in love with Oz for my liking.

Other reviews

• lonesomereader
• John Cook

"Modern fog" by Chris Emery (Arc, 2024)

Poems from Ambit, Bad Lilies, London Magazine, PN Review, etc.

Here's the start and end of "The Path" -

• All the no-shows picking their way/ through whin and leaf mould along the path,/ with England's wild attendance/ flinging or fleeing, will not remind.
• I have led you here through all possible music/ for something we cannot wholly know/ and you will pull up my hand and kiss it/ and carefully we walk on.

I don't understand all the first sentence - why "no-shows"? The final sentence's sentiment is repeated later. There are journeys, guides and things just beyond our understanding - "something lost" (p.14); "All that remains is absence" (p.12); "the dogs/ are astounded at the edge of what's never/ fully grasped" (p.12). Elsewhere the persona aims "to solemnise the marginal and lost" (p.61)

There's detail - universes in grains of sand. There are mere symbols (faded memories, souvenirs) of something that used to mean so much. I'm rather allergic to writing that's about things just beyond our understanding. Meditations aren't my thing either - which is maybe why "At St Helen's Ranworth" (a 12 part, 12 page piece) didn't grab me.

There are animals (dogs, marsh harriers, hare, fox, seal, etc) - observation, followed by a dream or their death. "Hares" is the easiest of these pieces.

Sometimes it's as if he feels the need to insert adjectives, so he scatters some in, hopefully. They work in "The lane tipped out beside dumped farm metal/ and plucked fields" (p.61) ("metal" is preferable to the more obvious "machinery". I've seen "plucked fields" before, but it's ok). I like "puffed vintage cloud" (p.47). In "we're out/ in cream air, old roads, lobbed estates seeping/ by the rim of each roundabout -/ the weedy local bypass, a single show house empty" (p.63) I like "lobbed estates" but why "seeping"? Some other lines have the sheen of poetry but I'm not always convinced -

• The dreamy sky is yellow, then russet under/an octave of stars (p.27). Why "octave"?
• I ask you if you/ understand the marriage of things when it gets dark,// you say the world belongs to itself for sure (p.27). Maybe. Borderline.
• No one told him he could make his deep mother/ from apple pips and spider legs/ in the latrine (p.31). Eh?
• We're taking pets from town to town,/ driving through thunderstorms/ in a garbage countdown/ to the metal noon. (p.32). Eh?
• Dawn's unlost loves/ curtained in sweeping hail. The slowest east./ Everything counting and counted that shoves/ from grey acres into one venal feast (p.74). Eh?
• all that sweet showiness we go through while May dies/ and another season crams its heat/ into the centre of you, grown so tall,/ then suddenly it is over (p.72, "Cow parsley"). That works for me.
• The government of my hours knocked back,/ staring at each maquette fried stiff inside its clock of limbs,/ the easel flayed with time and yet our sun-bare god had turned/ to spread new lies into each other (p.59). Eh?
• the dream so hot/ we formed a simple absence of ourselves/ in the reckless afternoon (p.50). Maybe, but by p.50 readers are overdosed on absences.
• He was slowly withdrawing from us/ nothing to clear the debris of him, the world/ relaxed into him with all its fiery prayer (p.53). Borderline but no - too keen to get "prayer" in.

I like the idea of "The establishment of the scene" whose last line is "Our end is your beginning. Titles. Snow". Mostly the book's line endings don't matter much though p.54 and p.66 nearly have full end-rhymes.

Other reviews

• Martyn Crucefix (The poems revel in describing aspects of this world and ... the occasions for such descriptions arise from journeys (often walking – the cover shows a hand-holding rambling couple) and the highlights of such journeys are frequently encounters with creatures ... There is more than a little of Philip Larkin in Emery’s work ... [In] The remarkable poem ‘Stags’ ... the momentary sighting of the creatures is (in the poem itself) now no more than a shaky memory, an ‘absence’ that stands ‘at the edge of what’s never / fully grasped’. But the recall of their passing still has a potency as a ‘store of grace and loss’ and is here declared ‘the last religion of these woods’.)
• Jackie Law (While the intended meaning of certain poems remained at times opaque, the language employed proved rich and pleasurable to peruse and attempts to unpick.)
• Jonathan Evens (The new themes he found included writing about spirituality, something, he once thought he would never do, and mystery – “the mystery of place, the mystery of the Other, the mystery of ourselves” ... The Path’ seems to sum up most fully the journey he undertakes in this collection)

"Flash fiction festival eight" by Jude Higgins & Diane Simmons (eds) (Adhoc fiction, 2025)

An anthology of pieces mostly by people who attended the 2025 Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol. Favourites include "Petunias" (Kathy Fish), "The Beachcomber's Daughter" (Karen Jones), and "Character wants" (Nora Nadjarian)

"The patron saint of lost souls" by Menna van Praag

An audio book set in Cambridge, England.

Jude, 46, works in Gatsby's - not a trinket/antique shop, but a place where people discover their talismans and wishes come true. When a half-sister (who she never knew she had) dies, she adopts Gertrude, 11, who is beautiful and has a talent for assessing people's problems.

Viola did a term at Trinity before her father died. "She always experienced everything twice: when it happened and when she told her mother it happened". She works in a restaurant and a cooking competition is coming up. She sleeps with her boss Henri, a competitor.

Matthieu, a lecturer, has a son Hugo, 11. His wife died in Paris 2 or 3 years before. Hugo still isn't eating properly. He meets Viola. They sleep together. Hugo doesn't warm to Viola. Viola wonders how Matthieu could have grieved while having to look after a child.

Jude has a conversation with her half-sister as if she were alive. She finds her own lucky charm. Gertrude suggests to Viola that she go abroad seeking a husband, letting Getrude look after the shop. Her drunkard father is dying in Addenbrooke's hospital. She and Gertrude visit him.

Viola loses the competition - she was late. Henri wins, and invites her to be his deputy in Paris.

One year later - Matthieu and Hugo, in Paris, are led to Viola's cafe by Matthieu's brother, Francois. Jude talks to her dead sister Francis again. Francois drops into Gatsby's and falls in love with Jude. He had an affair in France with Francis. Is Getrude his daughter? Viola returns to Cambridge and starts a market stall. Matthieu sees her there. Having given up her career for him, she move in. Hugo gives her his mother's notebook of recipes.

Big dollops of whimsy. Not for me.

Other reviews

• goodreads

"City swimmers & other stories" by Steve Clark (Black note press, 2024)

These stories seem previously unpublished. He's had fiction published in "The Paris Review" and poetry published in various magazines.

• For the love of Wasabi peas - A couple who have married 3 times (for 7 years, then 4 years, then 2 years ago) and divorced twice meet in a hotel bar after an argument the day before. He's prepared for a new adventure. She's angry and wants to learn from the experience. She says "I'm not taking about us. Don't worry. That's done". When she leaves through the revolving door she gets stuck because he followed her and pushed the door. "When you fall in love, no matter how old you become, how many years pass, a part of you remains that age for each other forever"
• City swimmers - It begins with "1. This is a story about a run. He runs. Pages fall behind him with the changing leaves. Mental scribble. Knots in the plot come loose. He's trying to figure out the story. Clara on the 6 train ...". It turns out that the text in italics is (I think) drafts written by the running man. Nikolai walks son Sasha (6) to school. Clara has twins, almost 10. Clara is 75, wandering in New York. Nikolai finds himself in the same street as Clara. When Sasha is 7, Clara tells him she's having another baby. Sasha can tell that his father's not happy. Towards the end "At some point, he will have to meet her. He knows what the story is about; he's not someone who doesn't know what the story is about. Sasha will be old enough then."
• A small yellow space - Billy is married to Maude. They have a little boy Leon. Billy answers the land-line. It's Malachi (Maude's brother) asking to speak to Maude. Billy says no. Malachi didn't organise or attend his mother's funeral. He apologies about something else. After the call Maude asks "What'd he say?" and Billy replies "Same as last time".
• The revenge fund - A bouncer (who's also an artist) refuses entry to a woman because she's not pretty. Someone organises an exhibition for him. When he and his guests turn up they find an empty room - she'd planned it all.
• Pizza thanksgiving - Banter while watching skaters
• His day at the beach - His (soon to be ex) wife Marika and kids are at the beach. She calls him and puts his son Mighty (11) on the line. He's having panic attacks and says his mum's crying. He takes the train. At old women leaves her crossword behind. He takes it with him. At the meal table little Minty says "Lobsters are people too. Mighty giggled and looked at his father (apparently, these pronouncements from his younger brother were not unusual). "They are?" "Yes, red and yummy like my brother". Back at his motel he thinks about past lovers. A fire-alarm goes off at 4:26am. He looks at the crossword.
• Strange beds, strange houses - A 29 y.o. woman has rented a home for a few days with her brother, 36. She's been with Walter for 8 years or so. She's invited him to the house. He's asked her to marry him. He can't drive. He reads her brother the break-up letter she intends to gve Walter. The week before she'd suddenly fancied an old, married friend.
• A last stroll through her favorite city - He's wandering in Paris while his wife is in bed with flu and his 2 young sons are with the nanny. He's going to die today. They've been in the States for a few years. He'd wanted to be a writer but ended up in Finance. He sees an ex, his father, his wife as she was when a girl, then he dies
• Aren't you glad I called? - John and Linda have a daughter Josephine. When she was about 20, Linda went with Adrian to work in an Alaskan cannery. They lasted 3 years. "he married a marine biologist with a tolerance for pain and moved to Rajasthan". Decades later he phones her out of the blue. Later, she hears of his death
• The reunion - He's offered a ride by one of his female creative writing students, in her boyfriend's car. Later she shows him her poems and they have an affair. Her boyfriend tells him that he forgives her. 2 years later the lecturer has his first novel published and he marries his pregnant ex-student. Her ex-boyfriend starts appearing on TV, eventually getting his own right-wing show. After 19 years, the narrator divorces. His wife re-unites with her ex-boyfriend. His 2 sons become Trump fans.

Many young children. The dialogue isn't crisp - more novel-paced than story-paced. "His day at the beach" might be my favourite.

Other reviews

• goodreads ("His Day At The Beach", “The Revenge Fund” and “A Last Stroll Through Her Favorite City” are singled out)

"Gravity" by Erica Wagner (Granta, 1997)

Stories from Critical Quarterly, BBC R4, etc.

• Gravity - A male astronomer (his PoV) in a remote observatory receives a fellow astronomer, Victoria, who sometimes comes to his room at night. When they're both at the top of the structure she slips and dies. He says he didn't push her. The language is lush with scientific imagery (Special Relativity moreso than General) -
  • "An night one sees further, more clearly, past the haze of atmosphere and without the distraction of other waking voices. My night vision is very keen and I saw her coming from a long way away, the jeep winding slowly up the road that runs like a thin blue vein on the skin of the mountain"
  • "There are some who say that there are gravitational fields in space so strong that they might act as time machines; that could we survive their tremendous compression, we would emerge in ancient space, return to see a hot dust cloud spinning where we look for the blue eye of our home planet. We would find worlds strange and marvellous to us, suspended in the void of space: there would only be the void to recognise" (the ending)
  I admire the ambition. I like enough of it.
• Stealing - from when she was younger than 11 she started stealing money from her parents, buying candy so that she got fat despite her mother making her do dance classes. Then she more or less stopped eating at home, still not losing weight. The ending is "Some days I wonder if I'll tell her, tell her about the quarters and the bills and the lost afternoons that ate into my life and made my first husband say, Jeannie, I'd stay if you'd lose some weight - but I don't think I will". No.
• Please Don't - When a woman researches in a library about Iceland for someone else, there's a note each time she returns to her desk, telling her not to sigh, etc. At the end she hears a man saying "Please don't cry". It's the librarian - "his eyes as blue as polar drift, the silver at his temple, the roses of colour still bright in his cheeks." She asks "Is it against the rules?" He replies "No. But like bottles of ink - it shouldn't be necessary anymore."
• A Monkey - A married German man, about 30, is with a boy, about 3, in Thailand. They've recently met. The boy was starving. The man (at least) will return to Berlin ("The doubtful legality of his errand assails him"). They've a day to kill. A truck stops. The boy seems interested in a ride. The German, using mime, says he wants to see a church. They get in and are driven away from the city into the hills - "The town disintegrates at its edge: seems to crumble like biscuit into expanses of half-cultivated fields littered with broken cement blocks". They're stopped at a checkpoint with 6 armed soldiers. They get through and reach a temple shrouded in mist. On a statue of Buddha is a monkey with glowing eyes - "When it leaps, skittering across the icy floor and disappearing out into the forest below, it is as if it had never been". I like it.
• How Many There Are, How Fast They Go, The Direction They Go In - The first-person female narrator met Jackson at a rodeo. She recalls them driving drunk through a desert, looking at stars. He died in a car accident. While their 2 little kids were with neighbours, the narrator went with Jackson's mother Janice to the funeral home. The narrator fell asleep. No.
• The Great Leonardo - a priest recalls a woman's first visit to his church. He fantacises. A ringmaster recalls a stranger arriving, wanting to be a lion-tamer. The current lion-tamer is an alcoholic so the ringmaster takes the stranger on as an apprentice. The stranger says he used to be a priest. The apprentice soon takes over, not saying a word during the act though as a priest he'd been praised for his beautiful voice. When woman finally starts confessing, the priest runs from the box and defrocks. The circus act ends by him putting his head into the lion's mouth. One evening the loin closes its jaws. He recalls the stare of the woman in the church. Not bad.
• Haircut - Jim, married 5 years to Linda, sees/overhears in New York 3 people he's not seen before - Sandy (ex art student, now law student), Art and Felicity. Jim suddenly decides to have a haircut. The barber starts using a cut-throat razor. No
• Jamie - "He" dreams of driving in a Grand prix race and crashing. He's not a fan of car racing. Jamie, 19, returns after his first term at uni to parents Ellen (a potter) and Simon. When Simon and Jamie go to the pub, Jamie's drawn to an arcade car racing game. Later, Simon writes Jamie a letter, writing things he'd been too shy to say, "blinking away the prism that threatens to explode the neat black lines of his being". He doesn't send the letter. Simon and Ellen visit Ellen's parents as they do each fortnight. He sees an album of photos that he's not seen for years, of Simon as a toddler. He says "He's doing well. At college. Don't you think?" Jamie was killed by a careless driver before he was two.
• A Simple Question - Suzanne (just separated from her husband of 5 years) is on holiday in France with Freya, a rich friend who she's known since childhood. When they were 9, cycling out together, Suzanne had an accident, losing teeth, making her less of a risk-taker. In France she's being interviewed at 2am - "While we talked, he took my fingerprints. He held my fingers as if they were newts and pressed them down firmly on a pad of ink, then pressed them again on cards that said main gauche and main droite. He talked to me all the while, as if he didn't want me to notice what he was doing.". We learn that they got into an amphitheatre in the night and Freya was climbing high - presumably dying after a fall.
• Pyramid - In the year of her birth, her father's pyramid was started. "On these nights with no moon the light from the stars stops far short of the ground and hangs like a distant celebration at which no one is welcome". After 16 years, building stops. She is offered to the chief mason. She refuses him until building resumes.
• A Few Hours at Home - Her lover's away for a week with others. Will he phone? She misses him. should she phone him? No.
• The Bends - "Songs are like smells, insiduous: they bubble into your blood and stay there like pearls of nitrogen, giving you the bends". The first-person photographer, female with a PhD boyfriend liked "running along the road to Grantchester. I ran every day then, the same route, from my house along the road past the Unicorn, the Green Man, the Red Lion, the Blue Ball" - my nearest pubs! She falls in love at first sight with a thatcher. She drives to Norfolk with him. Together they save a sheep. They hug. The narrator tells us that she wanted to end the story there, but she knew they weren't suited. She will accept the PhD student eventually. No
• Back Home - The female (late middle-age?) narrator returns to her dead mother's plush New York appartment after years away. She recalls how at 9 she saw a dead man in the street and her mother was over-interested. She recalls how later she and her parents played in the snow like a normal family. Her mother's bedroom is like a hospital room. She finds a stash of letters she's sent her parents dating from 1951 when she started boarding school. She leaves, then returns to fetch the letters. No.
• Mysteries of the Ancients - Greg (first-person narrator) is with brother John (12) and dad watching a TV program about ancient wonders. His mum left 6 months before. Dad decides to start car trading. Greg has to stay home from school to deal with phone inquiries. Dad bemoans the lack of greatness in modern society. He takes them to see London Bridge (the one at Lake Havasu). Old cars that he's bought begin to fill their street. Out of the blue his mum briefly phones. Dad sells their truck and quits his factory job. He buys a plot of land and covers it with concrete. His cars arrive in a cavalcade and are winched into the concrete. In time it becomes a tourist attraction. At 35 pages the longest story, and one of the best

Other reviews

• goodreads ('Mysteries of the Ancients', 'A Simple Question', 'Please Don't', 'Pyramid' and 'Stealing' are singled out)

"The Seven doors" by Agnes Ravatn

An audio book.

Nina, a Literature prof, and Matts (doctor) live in Bergen, Norway. Their house is about to be knocked down - compulsory purchase. They've been there for 35 years. They'll miss their allotment opposite. Their daughter Innabor (who has a daughter Melia) need a new house too. Innabor and Nina knock on the door of a house they rent out to tell the tenant they're likely to want it soon. Nina does a talk about how literary scholars would make good detectives - it goes viral. The tenant disappears, leaving a box of her stuff behind. Nina discovers that Mari's been a violin prodigy. She meets Mari's separated husband, who's just become conductor of Bergen Philomonic. She says he's dedicated his first performance (of Bluebeard's Castle) to Mari. She meets her parents. They say that she left her 3 y.o. son with them, that they'd sacrificed a lot for her, that she'd given up her career and sold her violins and had been editing/translating instead. The father tells Nina that Mari and her mother didn't get on. The little boy's father isn't the husband, which is what caused the separation. Nina goes to the police, who've read the article about her. She explains that the Freudian interpretation of the opera (which mentions 7 doors) is male rage at female unfaithfulness. After 2 weeks, still no leads. Looking through Mari's notebook, Nina deduces that Mari was moody and interested in Freudian transference - was her lover a therapist? Nina reads that transference depends on a power difference. The more neutral the person with power, the more easily that transference is possible.

Mari's found in the sea. Her parents seem unemotional about it. Her husband said that Bluebeard was her favourite story.

Her husband reveals that she had cancer four years before. Matts reveals that her lover was his brother, an oncologist. She became obsessed with him, threatened to kill herself. His brother's wife doesn't know. Nina is angry, but accepts that revealing the fact will solve nothing. But shouldn't a doctor who exploits their patient be exposed? Then she discovers that actually her husband was Mari's lover. She accuses (with no evidence) her husband of drowning her in their bath, then dumping the body. He points out that nothing would be gained by getting him arrested. Their daughter may have overheard and called the police.

I don't like "Nina shakes her head inwardly" and there are at least 4 instances of "she thought to herself". I didn't believe in the husband.

Other reviews

• jenmed ( Each of the characters are flawed but the revelation of these flaws is slow and purposeful adding to the tension within the book.)
• Kim Evans (What follows is a readable, if predictable mystery tale. The story, and title, is inspired by the fairytale Bluebeard and its subsequent adaption into an opera by the composer Bartok. This fairytale is discussed at length several times by Nina and her close friend and sometimes feels like it’s being hammered home a bit too forcefully, so that any subtext just feels a lot more like text.)