Tag: short stories

The bedside bookstack –October 2025

Speak to me of Home by Jeanine Cummins, Tinder Press, 2025

I loved this multigenerational narrative of three Puerto Rican women from the same family who migrate to America. Their personal stories and experiences project the bigger cultural and political influences of their ages regarding gender, identity and race. Each of them – Rafaela, Ruth and Daisy have unique circumstances that both bind and distance them from each other. And running through it all is that ongoing question of what and where makes a place ‘home’?

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, Virago, 1952

This novel about an unmarried woman in post-war London is rich with that arch wit which the British do so well. Mildred Lathbury is open about how society views women like her in such an honest way that it doesn’t feel self-deprecating. She’s ‘such a help’ yet completely forgettable. When the Helena and Rockingham Napier move into the flat below, they bring equal measures of glamour and drama with them.

I loved reading this book. I spent half of it wanting to highlight phrases and fold pages (but couldn’t cos it was a library book) because she just got it so right, feelings of jealousy and hope and disappointment. The other half I was just furious about these ridiculous men who don’t do anything and make sure to have ’excellent women’ around them so they can continue to be cooked and cleaned for. So infuriating. I was dying for Mildred to just say ‘No!’.

Air by John Boyne, Doubleday, 2025

This is the final book in John Boyne’s The Elements series. I loved Water and was absolutely destroyed by Earth and Fire but felt that I’d come this far and may as well brave Air.  And I’m so glad that I did. Whereas the earlier books may have had one or two characters or events overlapping, Air brings together threads from each of the previous books and turns them into something more hopeful. There is damage and consequence but also the promise of resolution and healing. Once again, he is the master of character voice. His first-person narrators come so fully formed and complete. If you have survived the horror of Earth and Fire, then at least allow yourself the balm of Air.

Little World by Josephine Rowe, Black Inc., 2025

Josephine Rowe pops up every few years with another collection of stories. She’s partway Australia’s version of Claire Keegan in that there’s a quiet space around her stories and a stillness to the narrative. They’re always moving forward but in such measured increments. This is more a story cycle than standard collection as they all brush up against each other linked by their proximity to the ‘incorruptible’ and non-decomposing body of a girl-saint who joins the narrative with her own thoughts.

Desolation by Hossein Asgari, Ultimo Press, 2025

This is a story about 1980s Iran. It follows Amin, his love and his family and how life continues after he loses his brother when Flight 655 was shot down. I’ve only just started this one and already it’s an insight into a time and country I know very little about, outside of headlines.

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The bedside bookstack – September 2025

Too soon by Betty Shamieh, Avid Reader Press, 2025

This book tells the story of three generations of Palestinian/American women. In 2012 Arabella wants to be known more for her art than her cultural heritage, almost at any cost. In 1975, her mother Naya, never wanted to marry and struggled with the motherhood that came with it and in 1963 her mother Zoya had to leave her homeland and an old love story behind. These women, fallible and flawed, and their lives tell the personal cost and inheritance of dispossession more than any historical or political commentary could and that was even before the current occupation of Gaza.

Labour of Love by Oceane Campbell, Pantera Press, 2025

Oceane was my guest for the September Books at the Bowlo and it was such a pleasure to complement the book with even more background and detail from our chat. This is a memoir of both her midwife and motherhood journey. We follow her as a student midwife through to the experienced practitioner she is today, concurrent with her IVF experiences.

She is a passionate advocate for respect and consent in the birthing space and shares stories of love and loss from her time in the birthing suite. I loved hearing about hospitals and the system from the inside. Lot’s of tears from me reading this one – happy and sad.

Frog – the Secret Diary of a Paramedic by Sally Gould, Simon & Schuster, 2025

Another health system memoir – completely by chance. This book also charts the journey from student paramedic through to experienced professional. Sally Gould’s father was a paramedic, so she grew up with all his stories. For her, being a paramedic is a calling but not everyone welcomes a young female who has come through the university system. She loves what she does but there’s a balance that needs to be struck between what she witnesses on-the-job and how to process it.

This was also compulsive reading for me. I just swallowed up the insider insight of her stories and it was interesting to reflect on my ambo interactions, having more detailed knowledge and context of the system.

Thanks for Having Me by Emma Darragh, Joan, 2024

I’m always up for short stories that can stand alone or work as a connected narrative. I also spend so much time reading British, Irish and American authors that it’s such a pleasure to read an Australian story which also has such a specific and detailed sense of place – in this case suburban Wollongong. Then you’ve got mothers, daughters and sisters. Yes, yes and yes. Coming of age, the darker corners of motherhood and the quotidian – all right in my sweet spot.

Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan, Hutchinson, 2024

Anyone who’s read the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy will be familiar with Kevin Kwan’s work – established money, new money and humble money try to get the balance right amidst the generational and cultural pull of those around them.

Rufus Leung Gresham is set to be the next Earl of Greshamsbury but the estate is bankrupt. His mother, a former Hong Kong model, wants him to make it right by marrying money but Rufus has just realised he’s in love with his best friend and neighbour, Eden Tong.

This looks big at 435 pages but was great fun and completely compulsive reading. I also have no interest or knowledge in fashion/designers, so just skipped all the bits where he lists what everyone is wearing.

The Matchmaker by Saman Shad, Viking, 2023

Saima is a Matchmaker. It’s her job. Despite being young and single, business has been good but some in the Desi community think her methods are too modern. Her cash flow is low when Kal’s wealthy parents offer her a slightly different job. She needs to convince him to use her services without knowing it’s his parents who set it up.

You don’t see Sydney much in novels and I loved seeing it on the page here from Bexley to Harris Park, along the Parramatta trainline, then dropping in to Ultimo or Gordon. Kal and Saima had great chemistry and this was a great insight into to the cultural complexity of being a third culture kid with home simultaneously in many places and none.

Signs of Damage by Diana Reid, Ultimo Press, 2025

When Cass is 13, she joins the Kelly family for a holiday in the south of France. In a dual narrative of that time and the present, we work towards an incident which some think shaped events in the present while others have a more complete picture. 

I heard an interview with Diana Reid when she’d just started writing this and she talked about wanting to examine the over-use of the trauma trope in fiction. If I hadn’t heard that, I would’ve thought maybe it was more just using trauma rather than examining it as part of the narrative.

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The bedside bookstack –August 2025

For Life by Ailsa Piper, Allen & Unwin, 2024

This is a memoir of grief and loss. Ailsa Piper loses both her husband and father and you’ll be left to wonder how so much loss and the life which follows, can read so beautifully.

After recently losing my mum, I’m not sure why I picked this up, if it was pressing a bruise or permission to feel and find common ground with others who are mourning. Reading it, there was the realisation again that life and loss co-exist, neither one of them stopping to respectfully give way to the other.

The Spare Room by Helen Garner, Text Publishing, 2008

Another memoir about dying. I wasn’t deliberately picking them up, I promise, but just like the parent-dying movies which came my way, I didn’t avoid them either. This is Helen Garner’s account of her terminally ill friend coming to live with her to do a series of dubious Vitamin C treatments which promise to heal her.

It’s Garner, so we know that no one will be spared from the truth of ungenerous feelings, how slow death can be, how caring for the sick can be maddening and how even in the face of mortality we can bicker and be our own human selves.

Fine just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx, 4th Estate, 2008

Apart from two satires about the devil which didn’t really land with me, this is typical Annie Proulx short story territory – the landscape is always there, never a bit player, constantly bending characters into and out of their own shape, the lives are small and often short and the writing is of course, sublime.

An Academic Affair by Jodi McAlister, Allen & Unwin, 2025

Sadie and Jonah have been at uni together for 15 years. There’s always been a rivalry between them intensified by his little rich boy status and her battler background. This amps up as their academic careers progress and they compete for the same few positions. Then a partner-hire position comes up in Tasmania and they could both have it if they can make people believe that they’re a couple.

This was as much about the current precarious state of universities as it was an academic romance. It was also a break from everything being so big and hard and assured like in the Ali Hazelwood STEM romances I’ve been reading – nothing wrong with that. It’s just nice to know that enemies can find their way to lovers even when they’re not an Alpha male with Adam Driver proportions.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, 4th Estate, 2024

Rika is a journalist for a men’s magazine. She works hard and is determined to get an interview with Manako Kajii, the infamous murderer who is accused of seducing three men with her cooking and killing them. The pair initially start writing letters, discussing food and recipes. Then Rika starts to visit and have a gastronomic awakening.

As with a few of the other Japanese books I’ve read over the past few years, there is the constant and suffocating expectations and lack of opportunity around what kind of woman you can be. I wanted to love this. I wanted to support its critique of societal expectations for women and of course I wanted to join all the millions of international readers who turned it into a best seller but I kept falling asleep when I picked it up and never finished.

Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, Serpent’s Tail, 2017

A collection of short stories, some almost from a dreamscape. The back cover bestows a lot of adjectives – unique, original, genre-demolishing, sensual and wild. There was a particularly prescient story of a modern plague society which would’ve been written and published before we’d even heard of COVID 19.

I didn’t read them all. There was a bleakness and darkness that was too much for me right now. It seems I can do memoirs about death but not general societal sadness.

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The bedside bookstack –March 2025

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, Corsair, 2020

This book is loosely based on Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who rallied the Turtle Mountain Reservation Chippewa Council and surrounding communities to stand against the US government’s 1953 ‘Emancipation Bill’.

The story is told along parallel lines following Thomas Wazhushk, the Night Watchman and his niece Pixie Paranteau who is searching for her sister who has left for the city but hasn’t been heard from. It’s Louise Erdrich, and a good story is always safe in her hands, so it’s a rich read in both form and content.

Bunny by Mona Awad, Head of Zeus, 2019

Hmmm. This one starts off whip-smart with our narrator’s arch observations of her teachers and fellow classmates at a prestigious arts college hitting just the right notes. But as things continued it felt like one of those movies where the preview is better than the movie.

It’s dark, satirical and subversive but after 200 hundred odd pages of Stepford-wifesque sorority girls creating perfect men from fluffy rabbits, it was just too OTT. I know, probably the point.

The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer, Text, 2024

This debut reads like fable with its magic realist jumps in time and its looping in on itself as we revisit the same hill and stretch of coastline again and again seeing how the people slot into place before and after each other.

There is a building on the hill which was a prison and then a hospital, an orphanage and then knocked down and reforested. We meet an occupant from each iteration and see how their heart and hope changed things a little for those who came next.

You don’t have to have a dream by Tim Minchin, Penguin 2024

This very readable little number is an illustrated collection of three speeches Tim Minchin gave at various institutions and an introduction to each. He has so much heart and it’s all out on his sleeve here. These are words to reassure and guide creatives and I’d have to say that some of them came at just the right time for me.

Following the Moon by James Norbury, Michael Joseph, 2024

This is another book for conflicted creatives. It carries the message of ‘keep going’ and ‘it’s the journey not the destination’ through the simple illustrated story of a little lost puppy and the wolf who tries to lead her back to her parents by following the moon.

James Norbury also wrote Big Panda and Tiny Dragon, which has apparently sold millions of copies. I’m glad he’s found his audience because he also has a lot of heart and in our loud world it’s nice to see that there’s still room for quiet reassurances.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez, Granta, 2021

These short stories are a walk on the dark side – hauntings, madness, missing children, abject desires and base behaviour. From Buenos Aires to Madrid, they’re always in the shadows where motives are suspect and it’s hard to find the light. A little heavy for my head at the time though, alas.

Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, Canongate, 1997

I ended up in a state of sheer rage that I picked this book up for 5 hours worth of train trip. Geoff Dyer wants to write a book about D.H. Laurence, not just yet, maybe he’ll write a novel first. No. He’s definitely going to start the D.H. Laurence book. But he might do some notes for the novel before that.

On it goes, page after page, procrastinating through European cities and Mediterranean islands. I’m too busy dealing with my own indecisiveness and anxiety to relish reading about someone else’s in such forensic detail. It drove me mad and I jumped ship. Funny how some things can be such a miss. It came recommended with such high praise from a festival interview.

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The Bedside Bookstack – September 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Corsair, 2010

Is it a novel or a collection of linked short stories? It doesn’t matter. I just loved it. You could feel how much she was enjoying setting limits and making up her own rules – no POV twice, show the passing of time, write a short story in as many different styles as possible. I mean, a short story through Powerpoint slides, that’s just genius!

Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha work together at Sow’s Ear record label. Forwards, backwards and to the side, each chapter gives us a little more of their story through friends, lovers, colleagues and family. How did I not know about this?? It’s been out for ages and even won a Pulitzer. Ne’er mind. Crisis averted. I know about it now and have the Candy House, her latest book, ready to go.

The Love That Remains by Susan Francis, Allen & Unwin, 2020

I had an author chat with Susan Francis for the September Books at the Bowlo and it was such a pleasure to read this book again in preparation. Full disclosure, Susan is the first writer friend I made when I moved to Newcastle, so I write this as a friend and reader.

Her beautiful memoir is proof that the story isn’t always the story and truth is certainly stranger than fiction. She starts out looking for her birth parents, moves to Granada with her husband and then discovers a secret from his past. There’s a lot I’m not saying so you can read the book without any spoilers but it was humbling to share this intimate story.

The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey, Europa, 2022

This is the first book I’ve ever read which is narrated by a magpie, Tama. It took me a little bit to get used to but then it seemed just as it should be for a magpie to be charting the toxic marriage of his owner and the random fame their magpie-human relationship has brought to the quiet hill-country farm they live on. Tama’s father always warned him about humans. He wasn’t right about all of them but he certainly has a point.

The Bookshop Woman by Nanako Hanada, brazen, 2024

My mistake was thinking that this was a novel, so I struggled and wanted it to be more than it was. Once I realised it was the author’s own story of meeting strangers and giving them book recommendations, it all changed. Then it became a fascinating insight into the rich and diverse world of Japanese books and literature and its own list of suggested reading essays, novels, manga, haiku and so many short story collections! The only disappointment was seeing all the asterisks next to the list of books, meaning they aren’t available in an English version.

I loved that she recommended Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. I don’t think it was ever published in Australia. I only know about it and have my copy because many moons ago I was an intern at the Berlin International Literature Festival and he was one of the guests. Nice guy. Great book.

Australiana by Yumna Kassab, Ultimo, 2022

Following on from A Visit from the Goon Squad, this is another novel/short story-cycle. When is something a collection of short stories rather than a novel? I guess when there is a continuing narrative. I’m a big fan in any case (another one to check out is Melissa Manning’s Smokehouse).  I love following a character at a point in time, magnifying in on them, then panning back out to follow someone they’ve brushed up against until we put together the bigger picture of a community and its unique characteristics. This is what Yumna Kassab did in her debut The House of Youssef with an urban setting. Australiana comes after she spent 3 years in Tamworth. This feels like a darker collection with heat and drought and desperation driving many of dynamics.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, Penguin Classics, 1986

I’ve got a pile of classics sitting at home. Every time I consider reading one, I think of the tiny font and the curly sentences and I’m already tired. But somehow, I made myself pick up Turgenev and give him a go (I loved his short story in the George Saunders collection A Swim in a Pond in the Rain).

The pleasant surprise is that he’s really easy to read. It didn’t feel like the mental effort of some others, like an assigned task to suffer through. Style wise, it was a real pleasure. However, I ditched it more than half way through because I was getting impatient with the long philosophical conversations about nihilism.

I know, I know, the whole point is the generational divide, in this case also showing the new ideas for a new Russia of the sons against the more stuffy traditional and institutional ideas of the fathers but after a while it just felt like men shouting at me and by page 189, I just wanted some peace and quiet.

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas, Bloomsbury, 2016

Yep, I’m back in the ‘Court of…’ spicy romantasy franchise. I’ve heard things taper off in the next few books, so I might leave it here but what I appreciated was that the deeds Feyre committed in the previous book and her transformation from mortal to immortal have left her with some pretty severe PTSD and rather than move on neatly to the next thing, a good portion of this book is a slow recovery from that trauma…..albeit aided by a new love interest.

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The bedside bookstack – June 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

In the Middle of the Fields by Mary Lavin, New Island, 2016

Mary Lavin is known as one of Ireland’s best short story writers. Colm Toibin writes a beautiful introduction in this edition, about how she doesn’t fetishise Ireland for foreign readers (many of her stories appeared in the New Yorker). She writes more about people’s dynamics and inner life than politics or culture. Her Irish women especially, are more than the stereotype of widow, tired mother or spinster. She’s so evocative, conjuring isolation or grief or joy in a few simple sentences and then keeping it there while she moves the story ever onward.

I’m dipping in and out of this collection, having decided that gorging on an anthology like I often do is theft to the individual stories. Consuming them one after the other doesn’t let me savour them or reflect.

The Raptures by Jan Carson, Penguin, 2022

It’s early nineties Northern Ireland and the Troubles are in full swing. Every night on the telly there are stories about bombs and fighting. In the small town of Ballylack a primary school child gets sick and dies. Then another one. And another. These are Hannah’s classmates. Her family aren’t Catholic or Church of England. They’re Evangelical, so she was already an outsider before the dead kids started talking to her.

There’s communities, conflict, faith and magic realism in this book, which sound like much more of an awkward mix than they turn out to be on the page.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, Vintage Books 2018

Celestial and Roy have only been married 18 months when he’s accused of a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to 12 years in prison. They remain married on paper but by the time he’s released early, they haven’t spoken in two years.

This is a big one. Like a Tolstoy tableau, one marriage plays out as a reflection of modern America with race, incarceration, inherited trauma and questions of loyalty and ownership at its heart.

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, Viking, 2021

In a South London pub a man and woman meet. Something starts between them, a connection that dodges definition. They’re both creatives, both scholarship kids who tried to fit in with their white peers, both sick of their friends matching the appearance of someone police are looking for.

This reads like stream of consciousness, a rhythmic parallel to the soundtrack of our narrator. It’s a very cerebral read and I picked it up with a flu fogged head and gave it a good go. I stayed the course for more than 100 pages but then abandoned ship. Not for me for right now.

The Grazier’s Son by Cathryn Hein, Harlequin, 2024

As mentioned, it’s been a bit of month, so it was nice that this month’s Books at the Bowlo author was rural romance writer Cathryn Hein. After hearing her talk about daydreaming along country roads, hero helicopter pilots and vintage fashion, I thought this might be just what I needed. Joining Stirling and Darcy on their bumpy road to happiness via embezzlement, infidelity, injuries and a surprise inheritance from an estranged father was just what I needed amidst my sneezing and sniffles.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Grove Press, 2015

A communist sleeper agent narrates this story during occupied Vietnam and in America after the fall of Saigon. I haven’t finished it yet but it’s right down there in the details. His voice is so distinct, incredibly dry yet conflicted about the compromises that are made and the moral questions of what he does. The bloody mess of war is not some aerial shot in this book. It’s right up close. The body count keeps climbing but unlike the faceless and expendable lives in an action movie, these people have names and families and lives they were living.

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The bedside bookstack – May2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

It’s more a small collection than bookstack this month. I need to get onto research for my manuscript and had to put a ban on novels because I just wasn’t getting the research reading done. But one cannot live on obligatory reading alone, so there are also some essays and interviews I’m including.

Beside Myself – An Actor’s Life by Antony Sher, Nick Hern Books, 2001

The main character in my manuscript is an actor, thus the multiple actor autobiographies I’m reading. This one has a lot about Sher’s early life in South Africa, his family dynamics and their formative nature. He had a distant father who never seemed to understand who he was and a mother who always championed him and believed he was destined for greatness.

I’m always curious about people’s emotional excavations into who they are and how they got to be that way but for my purposes, the real gold was in his detail about productions. It’s fascinating the fragile ecosystem that exists within this web of people brought together so intensely for a period of time. I also loved reading about the emotional preparation for his roles, how some of them fit and others never quite worked.

A lot of his work was with the Royal Shakespeare Company, so it was also a refresher on plays I hadn’t read in decades and an insight into others which I’d never read or seen staged.

Shakespeare – The Man who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench, Michael Joseph, 2023

Continuing on with Shakespeare is Judi Dench’s book which is an extended and ongoing interview with actor and director Brendan O’Hea. If Shakespeare doesn’t interest you, then move on because the title gives it away.

This is two people who know and love their stuff asking all the right questions and giving the answers that you can after a professional acting life that has spanned decades. Again, the detail and deconstruction that is needed by the actor when playing a character is incredible to read about and gives me a much deeper understanding of the texts.

Dear Life by Alice Munro, Vintage, 2012

Alice Munro died this month and so in honour of one of the greatest modern short story writers, I had to pull a collection out in memoriam. What is there to say? She’s measured and quiet in tone but there’s nothing empty about her stories. There is always much more going on under the surface and she’s a great witness to life’s contradictions and unpredictability. After this reminder, it’s time to go back to some of her earlier collections which I haven’t read yet.

Paris Review articles on Alice Munro

The Paris Review is famous for its interview series with writers The Art of Fiction. These are extended interviews written out in complete question and answer format. For a limited time the Alice Munro – Art of Fiction 137 interview is available for all to read.

The Paris Review also wrote an obituary for her What a Goddam Writer She Was as well as an essay Inside Alice Munro’s Notebooks.

Jenny Erpenbeck on the Death of her Mother, Granta

I’ve also been thinking about Jenny Erpenbeck’s personal essay in Granta Open Book-keeping ever since I read it.

She writes about her mother’s death and then in detached but loaded detail continues with the bureaucracy you need to deal with after someone dies. It’s a lot of work to finalise someone’s life and though the person isn’t left, their ‘things’ still are.

This resonated with me because my mum has recently gone into residential aged care and I’m going up and down between Newcastle and Sydney slowly clearing her place out with my brother and sister. There’s a lot to discover about a person you only knew as a parent and plenty of decisions about ‘things’ and ‘stuff’, what matters and means something and does that then mean you have to keep it.

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The bedside bookstack – March 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Water by John Boyne, Doubleday, 2023

I’ve never read anything by John Boyne before but plenty of other people obviously have because the list of books he’s published comes in at 23 (including the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas).

You learn a thing or two after writing that many books and most noticeable for me was how well he did a first-person female narration. Vanessa Carvin goes to a remote Irish island to escape her recent past and think about her role in it. Initially all you know is that her husband is in jail and that there was scandal surrounding his trial. She had two daughters but one of them is dead and the other one won’t return her messages.

This is a great read about power, the choices we make and the silence we allow.

North Woods by Daniel Mason, John Murray 2023

You know me. I love short stories, so I love a novel which can stand as it is or be seen as a collection of connected shorts and you can’t deliver four centuries of a single house deep in the woods of New England, Massachusetts without changing characters. This was a lush book. His use of language is exquisite and I always know I’m in the hands of a master when I grieve one story ending but am completely absorbed by the next one within a few pages. How to pick a favourite from the apple-obsessed ex-serviceman, the spinster twins, the fated bohemian lovers or the fake mystic who actually saw ghosts. I loved the variation of the inhabitants and the different styles used for their narratives, a mix of straight first-person, diaries, letters, third-person, newspaper articles and even an imagined speech given to a local historical society. It also includes the most intense insect sex-scene (or perhaps the only) I’ve ever read.

Tin Man by Sarah Winman, Tinder Press, 2017

I love Sarah Winman. I should say that right up front. After reading Still Life I’ve been steadily reading through her back catalogue and listening to interviews. This is great one on The First Time Podcast. Tin Man has been hailed by many people as one of her best. I liked it. A lot. But I didn’t love it as much as the others. It is a story of grief and loss and all the things which never were. Amidst that of course, is life and love and all the things which happen instead but the weight of Ellis and Michael’s recollections as they look back on their lives was too heavy for this reader at this time.

Women & Children by Tony Birch, UQ, 2023

Joe Cluny isn’t looking for trouble. The nuns just don’t appreciate his spirit. He has scars on the palm of his hands from their punishment which he hides from his mum. When Joe’s Aunt turns up at their house bloody and bruised, he sees the violence men are also capable of. His mum and sister are the strongest women he knows, but even they are powerless to stop it happening again. It’s a loss of innocence to realise that it’s it everywhere despite the silence, women and children on the other end of men’s violence.

I’m looking forward to hearing Tony Birch talk about this book at the Newcastle Writers Festival next week.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 2006

Yep, it’s back-to-back Maggie for me. I think I only have one or two books left on her backlist and one of them is already sitting on the bookstack for next month (The Hand That First Held Mine). If you’re looking for objectivity, don’t read any further. I just love her!

Esme Lennox is what they used to call ‘a handful’. She was an embarrassment to her colonial family in India and on moving to Edinburgh, becomes the cross her grandmother must bear. At 16, she is committed by her father to an institution and remains there for 60 years. When the facility is closed down, she’s released into the care of Iris, her sister’s granddaughter who never even know she existed. Families. Siblings. Secrets. And the dynamics are all pitch perfect. Told you she can’t do any wrong for me. 

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The bedside bookstack – September 2020

What I’m reading and what’s gathering dust on the bedside bookstack this month.

Educated by Tara Westover, Penguin, 2018

I couldn’t put this book down. It was me at the height of my voyeurism, gob-smacked at a glimpse into lives I can’t even imagine living. And that’s what books are for right, to take us somewhere else completely and allow us exposure into other pockets and corners of the world?

This is a memoir about growing up with a radical survivalist father, a violent brother and no formal education. It made me furious about these men who hold their family to ransom with their ideology and convictions and the social system that allows them to have that hold and sway over the people they love.

I’m so glad she wrote this so I could read it. But I always wonder about these translators, what is the cost in the end? She constantly weighs up the cost of splitting from her family which is huge enough but to then make that story public and for it to become a bestseller, I worry about the personal fall out.

Richard Fidler has a great chat with her on this Conversations episode.

In the Time of Foxes by Jo Lennan, Scribner, 2020

It wouldn’t be a bookstack without an anthology of short stories. These stories move from London to Wollongong to Moscow and even Mars. They follow people who are close but growing apart and strangers whose lives overlap even if it’s only for short time.

And always there’s the fox loosely linking one story to the next – as a painting on a wall, a personal characteristic or a real live animal digging up a backyard.

The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde, Scribner, 2019

This is the first climate fiction book I’ve read and I didn’t even know that’s what it was when I borrowed it. What to say about this genre? It’s important but uncomfortable to read because the facts aren’t good and the future scenarios are even worse. I hate to admit but after reading the news and working all day, eternal drought and water shortage are a tough bedtime read.

However, once I got into it, I found that that characters and the story distracted me from the doom of their surroundings.

This is two concurrent stories, one in 2017 and the other in 2041. The present follows Norwegian activist Signe as she takes part in her final protest which is both personal and environmental. She sails on her boat – the same boat that David and his daughter find in 2041 as they search for family and a future in a dry landscape where anyone who is left is searching for the same things too.

I’m thinking of ending things by Iain Reid, Text Publishing, 2016

I don’t usually read books that are scary but I read a good review of this one and also saw that Charlie Kaufman had made a version of it for Netflix. It’s the insanely tense story of an unnamed narrator and her boyfriend, Jake, as they go to visit his parents in a remote rural town.

In between the chapters there is dialogue from locals alluding to a gruesome crime. The build up is creepy and everything is just a bit off. The visit to the parent’s farm is weird and then they get caught in a snowstorm on the way home.

I didn’t finish reading it. I do most of my reading at night and I got genuinely spooked. I did skip to the end though…in the daytime and I was confused. Reviewers of the Netflix series said a similar thing.

I’ll leave you to read it in full, piece it together and get back to me.

Upstream by Mary Oliver, Penguin Press, 2016

Who doesn’t need Mary Oliver and her words by their side at the moment?

This one’s still on my pile from the June bookstack, the July bookstack, the August bookstack and will likely remain there into the future. There are some books that stay on the stack not because they’ve been forgotten and are a ‘should’, but because their presence is a reassurance.

Upstream is a book of essays rather than her usual poetry and they are perfect to dip in and out of. Her poetic reflections always slow things down to a pace we’re probably meant to be moving at anyway.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Penguin Books, 2004 (written sometime AD 121 – 180)

Will I ever read this book? This has been sitting at the bottom of the pile for a long time now. Even though I feel like I could and should be someone who reads Roman philosophy, it hasn’t happened thus far when I’m tired and have an o-so-finite reading window before I fall asleep.

I can’t quite give up on it yet though. I feel like there’s something in there for me, if I could just stay awake.

What to read and why by Francine Prose, Harper Perennial, 2018

Still haven’t read it, though my intentions from last month and the months before are the same:

When I read Francine Prose’s Reading like a writer, I fell even more in love with reading and writing. I walked away with a new list of recommended writers that I can’t believe I’d lived without, including Grace Paley and the Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant.

I haven’t started this yet, but I’m hoping for the same sublime experience.

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The Secrets Submerged in Single-Author Short Story Collections

Sometimes it’s the writer who is revealed rather than their characters when you read short stories in succession.

I’m a big fan of short stories, reading and writing them. My bedside bookstack and rescue reading posts are testament to that.

There are plenty of reasons I love short stories, but one of the unexpected outcomes of reading lots of them is suddenly realising that you now know a lot more about the author than perhaps they thought they were telling you.

Writers tend to circle around similar ideas and questions in their body of work. When you read a novel, it isn’t so obvious because it might be years until you read another book by the same author. But when you read short stories side-by-side, and especially if you read a ‘collected works’ which covers a lifetime of writing, you start to see the same things recurring again and again; adolescent insecurity that lasts into adulthood, a longing for mothers to be more maternal, fathers who are unreliable, people who try and create their family outside of their bloodline. These are a few I’ve picked up on in recent readings.  

Initially, it felt a bit underhand, like seeing someone undressed through a crack in the door. But writers write to make sense of things as well as to be seen. That’s where the fear and the vulnerability is.

I like seeing into other people’s lives. I’d like to find a nicer word than nosy, so it doesn’t feel so intrusive. Inquisitive perhaps? I’m endlessly curious about what motivates people, what’s formed them and causes them to act and see the world the way that they do. I’d be just as happy to find out if they told me directly but people aren’t always forthcoming about their internal worlds or even so reflective. So, I love it when they reveal themselves and what they’re trying to work out through the stories they write.

I’m in good company here. In a recent episode of The First Time Podcast, short story writer Laura Elvery (Ordinary Matter) talks about liking single-author collections for this reason. She also mentions American short story writer Laura van den Berg who says that she likes it when reading short stories feels like roaming around a house where there’s a new discovery about the author with every story.

As someone who’s currently working on a collection of short stories, I wonder exactly what it is that I’ll be revealing to readers.

Is this something you’ve noticed when you read collections?

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