SHORT STORIES – Oct 24, 2019

THE BBC NATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD 2019

(Comma Press £7.99, 144 pp)

As ever, the BBC National Short Story Award had an intriguing short list.

Lucy Caldwell’s The Children crackles with emotion as a mother discovers a lump in her breast and wonders how her children would remember her if she wasn’t there.

Ghillie’s Mum by Lynda Clark brilliantly explores the nature of belonging in the ever-changing relationship between a shape-shifting parent and her son.

And the poetic, otherworldly Silver Fish In The Midnight Sea by Jacqueline Crooks sees three children haunted by a Sound-Ghost, a duppy and the dreams of their sleeping mother.

The winner, The Invisibles by Jo Lloyd, is an entirely beguiling story where a Carnarvonshire woman describes to her close-knit farming community in the 18th century her visions of an invisible family who live nearby in an invisible mansion.

FREEMAN’S: CALIFORNIA

Edited by John Freeman (Grove Press £10.99, 304 pp)

Behind the California sunshine lurks something darker, a shadow world more akin to the stuff of nightmares than a state of hope.

These revelatory stories, poems and essays (mostly) edge towards this liminal territory, in works that range from the gently melancholy to the rightly outraged.

Tommy Orange’s Copperopolis delicately delineates the thinking behind a suicide attempt and how the recovery process leads him back to writing — as the narrator refines the words for a bank robbery note.

In the raw story Take It by Namwali Serpell, a 14-year-old homeless kid who’s seen more of life than most adults happens across a party of naked revellers, whose subsequent aggression makes his thieving spree of their belongings all the more efficient and thorough.

Meanwhile, Hector Tobar’s A Portrait Of The Artist As A Latchkey Child is a lovely look at the inner life of a child left alone as his mother is absent for long, long hours.

TO THE VOLCANO AND OTHER STORIES 

by Elleke Boehmer (Myriad £8.99, 224 pp)

The characters in these beautifully crafted stories often find themselves out on a limb, heading into or out of situations that make them feel isolated or alone.

A group of teachers and pupils go on a field trip to visit a long-extinct volcano and begrudgingly allow the college’s newsletter compiler along for the trip, where unforeseen emotional eruptions change lives and attitudes.

Lise (in South, North) has saved her wages from the ‘late shift at the drive thru fast-food servo beside the petrol station at the edge of town’ to fund a literary pilgrimage to France, but finds the Paris of Zola is very different from contemporary Paris with its ‘enormous concrete apartment blocks stained with rain’.

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