At the funeral
‘WE THEREFORE COMMIT her body to the deep …’ Leyla Moradi started in surprise. Admittedly, she hadn’t attended many Anglican funeral services, but something about the wording seemed a bit off. ‘… to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead…’ She risked a...
Friends and traitors
IMAGINE A GROUP OF BEST FRIENDS from university, now in their early forties, reuniting for a weekend to celebrate their enduring friendship. But this isn’t just any reunion – they’re about to open predictions they made about each other twenty years ago. This is the intriguing premise of Holly Watt’s sophisticated crime thriller, a page-turner...
A perfect life
THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG with the garden. You couldn’t see it, nothing was obvious. There were no strange plants organised in certain shapes, or sinister looking growths and weeds; the paths were orderly, and the lawns. Roses grew, and pinks, in the places that had been set there for them, and in autumn, berries came...
Dark, ingenious and daring: Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn
THE WAY PEOPLE TALK ABOUT short stories often inclines to silversmithing analogies: burnished, finely wrought, beautifully crafted. That, or Fabergé eggs. And we say short story collection rather than group. Collection suggests careful selection from an array of available possibilities, white daisies on a vast lawn. In the afterword of Pretty Ugly, a collection of...
Hemingway in Havana
Ian Fleming, then Foreign Editor of The Sunday Times, sent Norman Lewis to Cuba in December 1957. Fleming had recently met Lewis, and became a fan of his writing. Having been sent a proof-copy of The Volcanoes Above Us, he wrote to Lewis’s editor, ‘Volcanoes is a wonderful book… showing a fascinating mind and really...
Black Country noir
WHEN I SIT DOWN TO WRITE, I always – and I mean always – wonder why it is that I sort of default to ‘the dark side’, and why said dark side always positions itself in my writing here, where I live – where I actually live – in the Black Country. You probably don’t...
