#ShortStorySeptember Reading Options
It’s a little over a week now until Short Story September begins. I’ve been gathering potential reads, mostly from my own shelves. I used to have a dedicated short story shelf, but earlier this year interfiled everything into an alphabetical fiction sequence. When I went hunting through to pick out the story collections, they were more numerous than I expected! I recreated a temporary short story shelf (below), but it ended up overflowing…
I also earmarked a few books I wouldn’t mind rereading (left-hand stack). In the few cases where I have more than one option by the same author, I’ve pulled out the extras (middle stack). And I have a couple that would do double duty for R.I.P. (right-hand stack), which technically starts in September, though I usually don’t feel like reading for that challenge until closer to Halloween.
Here’s a library pile I assembled last week, another R.I.P.-suitable read that I’m partway through, and two late additions from a secondhand book haul.
But wait, there’s more! Here are some of the options on my e-readers:
My overall aim will be to cover a variety of time periods and styles, as well as author nationalities and genders.
Particularly for the classics and longer Collected/Selected volumes (Barnes, de Maupassant, Forster, Frame, Lawrence, Mansfield, Maugham, Porter, Williamson), I will probably choose just one renowned story to review.
I wanted to get ahead, so I’m now stuck into six collections already!
Spy anything that you have read and can recommend?
What have you got lined up for next month?
20 Books of Summer, 12–13: Strange Weather in Tokyo (#WITMonth) & Mitz
Two terrific novellas I’m belatedly writing up today, one my first selection for Women in Translation month and the other a contribution to Virago’s “Summer of Sigrid.” Both: 
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami (2001; 2012)
[Translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell]
Tsukiko is a lonely barfly in her late thirties when she bumps into her secondary school Japanese teacher, Harutsuna Matsumoto, again. She calls him simply “Sensei,” and they start meeting up for low-key adventures: sharing tofu and saké at Satoru’s bar, marking annual holidays, and leaving the city to forage for mushrooms and visit his late wife’s island grave. Sensei quotes poetry and, ever the teacher, gently corrects his former pupil’s language. Tsukiko is an impassive young woman who never seemed to grow up (“I … still might not be considered a proper adult. … I just wasn’t able to ally myself with time”) and is prone to drinking too much, but finally starts to get a grip on her emotions thanks to this new connection.
Each chapter is discrete, building into a linked short story collection. The erratic (non)use of speech marks somehow didn’t bother me as it seems to suit Tsukiko’s slight disorientation. Kawakami infuses the book with attention to the seasons’ changes and everyday sensual pleasures like food. A drunk at the bar speaks for us readers when he asks the main characters, “You two, just what are you?” The nature of their bond is hard to pin down. Tsukiko is also courted by Kojima, a more age-appropriate boyfriend, but she feels nothing for him. Instead, a May–December relationship unfolds like cherry blossom, ever so gradually, from friendship into something deeper. Powell manages to fit some wordplay into her translation, as in this gently erotic passage:
At some point, sitting beside Sensei, I began to notice the heat that radiated from his body. Through his starched shirt, there came a sense of Sensei. A feeling of nostalgia. This sense of Sensei retained the shape of him. It was dignified, yet tender, like Sensei.
From the title and cover image, I might have expected the magic realism so common to Japanese literature, but this is something different: a lovely, subtle romance. It’s a reminder that it doesn’t have to be torrid passion to be true love. “Even a chance meeting is the result of a karmic connection,” as Sensei quotes. Susan (A life in books), whose review is excerpted in my paperback copy, is quite right. Kawakami was a great new discovery and I’ve got my eye on several more of her books: The Nakano Thrift Shop from the library and Record of a Night Too Brief and Far from Everywhere (forthcoming in February) on my e-reader. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez (1998)
What a fun little book from Nunez’s back catalogue! On the one hand, a fictional mini-biography of the Woolfs by way of their pet marmoset might seem like a random choice of topic; on the other hand, you can see the seeds of her future autofiction in which human–animal connection is a starting point for wide-ranging meditations on life and death (a dog in The Friend; a parrot in The Vulnerables; and even, to a lesser extent, the cat in What Are You Going Through).
Mitz is a small monkey who induces strong, conflicting reactions: “You looked at her and thought, How grotesque. And the very next instant, How adorable. And then, How grotesque, again.” She takes a shine to Leonard on a visit the Woolfs pay to their friends the Rothschilds in 1934, and before long they’ve offered to take Mitz home to share their London and Sussex life, along with Pinka and Sally, the spaniels they had in succession. Mitz’s favourite spot thereafter was sat on Leonard’s shoulders, or napping on his feet. She accompanied the couple on their travels, too, so distracting people in Germany that Virginia would write in a letter that “the marmoset saved us from Hitler” (Leonard was Jewish). Visitors were less enamoured, thinking Mitz dirty and bad-tempered.
In any case, the creature was a lucky accessory to genius, and Nunez makes her our eyewitness to the composition of works such as Roger Fry and The Years:
From a distance, then, Mitz observed Virginia. And she saw how this mysterious activity that could bring such a flush to Virginia’s cheek could also have quite the opposite effect: Virginia was as white as her own writing paper. She scribbled and slashed; she muttered and she groaned and she cursed. She jumped up from the chair and wandered in circles about the room.
How much Mitz understands of ageing, death, and conflict, can never be known. These were tumultuous pre-war years, during which Virginia lost a nephew and fascism loomed large. Nunez sets personal cataclysms against international ones, imagining Mitz’s journey from a Brazilian forest, via a hellish ship, to the London junk shop where she was made to sit in a draughty window to drum up business. That she spent her last five years so loved and cosseted was a stroke of good fortune. Her death ends up feeling like a more general omen, as in the book’s final line: “It was Christmas Day, the last year of peace.”
I was reminded of the complications of keeping an exotic pet in My Animals and Other Family by Julia Blackburn, in which she buys Congo the bushbaby from Harrods (and there is also a family spaniel). As part of the backmatter of this reissue, a thank-you letter from Nigel Nicolson to Nunez and a 2019 afterword by Peter Cameron note the undeniable inspiration of Virginia Woolf’s Flush, a playful short biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel (for whom Pinka, a gift from Vita Sackville-West, was a model). I fancied rereading Flush so have picked that up as one of my substitute Books of Summer and am enjoying discovering the connections between it and Mitz. More anon.
With thanks to Virago for the free copy for review, one of several matching reissues they sent me as part of their “Summer of Sigrid.”
#ReadingtheMeow2026, Part I: Chinese & Japanese Authors
I’m a couple of days late, but here we go. It’s my fourth time participating in the annual Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri. Chinese and especially Japanese authors are famous for their literary love of cats. For my first post, I’m giving brief thoughts on a couple of Japanese novels – one of them a classic that may be responsible for the entire cat craze – and two examples of cute cat-themed manga.
I Am a Cat, Volume 1 by Natsume Sōseki (1905; 2025)
[Translated from Japanese by Nick Bradley]
Translator Nick Bradley makes a strong case for this as the “beginning [of] the Japanese cat book trend,” and I wondered if it was one of the earliest examples of the animal narrator, too. The unnamed feline antihero values brains over beauty: “Even though I am just a cat, I often like to philosophize. … Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have an admission to make. As far as cats go, I am no oil painting.” He’s lazy and fatalistic, contented to live out his days with the dyspeptic schoolteacher who has taken him in off the street. I’ll have to take Bradley’s word for it that this popular serialized novel (of which this is the first of three volumes) is a satire in which the cat is “a mirror to Japanese Meiji society at the time the novel was written.” The voice is amusingly lofty and snobbish, but I was uninterested in the story and set it aside at 35%, unsure whether to return to it in future. (Read via Edelweiss)
She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai and Naruki Nagakawa (2021; 2022)
[Translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori]
Shinkai is an anime filmmaker and I think this originated in his manga. I could spot the enduring influence of Sōseki in the setup of strays interacting with fellow cats and dogs. Most of these linked short stories involve young women grappling with turbulent careers and uncertain romantic relationships. When cats show up in their lives, they offer uncomplicated friendship and reliable tenderness. Narration, whether first- or third-person, alternates between owner and cat in each. I started reading this against my better judgement, as from The Guest Cat onwards I’ve found Japanese cat books bland and twee. It’s the combination of a flat style, my unfamiliarity with the context, and (magic) realism, which has worked for me with Murakami but hardly anyone else. This was a half-hearted skim. (Little Free Library)
Cat manga, though: that’s the ticket!
Chi’s Sweet France by Kanata Konami; illus. Catherine Bouvier (2025; 2026)
[Translated from Japanese by Akiko Indei and Pierre Fernande]
I had read The Complete Chi’s Sweet Home, Part 4 and really not enjoyed it (see above), but because this is a series of shorts, and set in France, it was palatable. I thought about saving it for Paris in July but ended up reading it on my computer in one sitting last month. Chi’s family (a mom, a dad and a little boy) moves from Japan to Paris. She wants to go outside and join the French cats in prowling the rooftops, but the mother says it’s too dangerous. Only when they move out to the countryside from the Paris apartment can she go outside. I don’t love the simplistic drawing style – no noses, a triangle or trapezoid for the mouth – or the cutesy writing (e.g. “Chi’s territowy”). Still, reading this was a pleasant way to spend half an hour. (Read via Edelweiss)
Mobu’s Diary: Earning Your Paté by Kathy Lam (2022; 2026)
[Translated from Chinese by Cindy Ko and Kevin Wang]
We have a winner! This comic was delightful through and through, and I hope more adventures are to come. Mobu is a three-year-old, slightly neurotic calico. This noble kitty decides she wants to earn her keep (imagine that!) and scans feline-suitable job listings: yoga teacher, massage therapist, pest exterminator, tuna sales rep… When she sees an opening at a cat café, she knows it’s right for her. The only issue is that she doesn’t really like being petted, so she mostly naps on higher shelves. All the same, just by being herself – playful, sleepy, cute and rotund – and observing human behaviour, she manages to be truly helpful. She comforts a distressed student who’s freaking out about a bad grade. She also notices and sometimes intervenes when ‘friends’ are really competing, a couple is fighting, and a boss is trying to take advantage of a worker. Her fellow cats are equally well drawn, and their antics could easily inspire a whole series. (Read via Edelweiss) Forthcoming from Andrews McMeel Publishing on 22 September.
Bonus:
Kitten by Stacey Yu – Yu’s first novel is a peculiar, endearing fable about a young Chinese American woman who identifies with her boyfriend’s cat as she works to overcome codependency issues with him and her mother. On a beach vacation, James cooks for Katie and does all the driving. “I liked being with James because he made it easier for me to be alive,” she admits to herself. James’s family pet, Silver, is the first cat she has met. James found Silver on this beach a decade before, and the cat regularly swims in the ocean with her owners. Katie is “struck by the intensity of my affection for her”—somewhere between maternal instinct and envy of the cat’s comfort and security. Yu maintains the uncomfortable ambiguity of the central relationships as literal realities and psychological explanations coalesce. That Katie’s estranged mother’s nickname for her is “Kitten” connects the novel’s major elements.
Forthcoming from Sceptre (UK) on 30 July and Random House (USA) on August 4. (See my full review for Shelf Awareness.)
Coming up tomorrow: An anthology of cat-related letters and a couple of short memoirs about life with a beloved cat.
Three on a Theme (Valentine’s Day): “Love” Books by Amy Bloom, George Mackay Brown & Hilary Mantel
Every year I say it: I’m really not a Valentine’s Day person and yet it’s become a tradition to put together a themed post featuring one or more books with “Love” or “Heart” in the title. This is the tenth year in a row, in fact – after 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. As you might expect, none of the three below contains a straightforward love story. The relationships portrayed tend to be unequal, creepy or doomed, but the solid character work and use of setting and voice was enough to keep me engaged with all of the books.
Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom (1997)
I’ve found Bloom’s short stories more successful than her novels. This is something of a halfway house: linked short stories (one of which was previously published in Come to Me; another that gives the title line to her 2000 collection A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You) about Elizabeth Taube. When we first meet her on Long Island in the 1960s, she’s a rebellious and sexually precocious Jewish girl; by the time we’ve journeyed through several decades of vignettes, she’s a flighty and psychologically scarred single mother. Stories of her Lolita-esque attractiveness to grown salesmen and teachers, her shoplifting, her casual work for elderly African American Mrs. Hill, and her great love for Horace, nicknamed Huddie, a Black basketball player, are in the first person. The longer second part – about the aftermath of her physical affair with Huddie and her ongoing emotional entanglement with her English teacher, Max Stone – is in the third person yet feels more honest. Liz seems like bad news for everyone she meets. Bloom shows us some of the reasons for what she does, but I still couldn’t absolve her protagonist. I’d also reverse the title: We Invent Love. Liz is responsible for irrevocably altering two lives besides her own based on what she needs to feel secure. This is very much Lorrie Moore territory, but Moore leaves less of a bitter taste. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project) 
A Calendar of Love and Other Stories by George Mackay Brown (1967)
The title story opens a collection steeped in the landscape and history of Orkney. Each month we check in with three characters: Jean, who lives with her ailing father at the pub they run; and her two very different suitors, pious Peter and drunken Thorfinn. When she gives birth in December, you have to page back to see that she had encounters with both men in March. Some are playful in this vein or resemble folk tales: a boy playing hooky from school, a distant cousin so hapless as to father three bairns in the same household, and a rundown of the grades of whisky available on the islands. Others with medieval time markers are overwhelmingly bleak, especially “Witch,” about a woman’s trial and execution – and one of two stories set out like a play for voices. I quite liked the flash fiction “The Seller of Silk Shirts,” about a young Sikh man who arrives on the islands, and “The Story of Jorfel Hayforks,” in which a Norwegian man sails to find the man who impregnated his sister and keeps losing a crewman at each stop through improbable accidents. This is an atmospheric book I would have liked to read on location, but few of the individual stories stand out. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury) 
An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel (1995)
Mantel is best remembered for the Wolf Hall trilogy, but her early work includes a number of concise, sharp novels about growing up in the north of England. Carmel McBain attends a Catholic school in Manchester in the 1960s before leaving to study law at the University of London in 1970. In lockstep with her are a couple of friends, including Karina, who is of indeterminate Eastern European extraction and whose tragic Holocaust family history, added to her enduring poverty, always made her an object of pity for Carmel’s mother. But Karina as depicted by Carmel is haughty, even manipulative, and over the years their relationship swings between care and competition. As university students they live on the same corridor and have diverging experiences of schoolwork, romance, and food. “Now, I would not want you to think that this is a story about anorexia,” Carmel says early on, and indeed, she presents her condition as more like forgetting to eat. But then you recall tiny moments from her past when teachers and her mother shamed her for eating, and it’s clear a seed was sown. Carmel and her friends also deal with the results of the new-ish free love era. This is dark but funny, too, with Carmel likening roast parsnips to “ogres’ penises.” Further proof, along with Every Day Is Mother’s Day, that it’s well worth exploring authors’ back catalogue. (Public library) 
Plus a DNF:
Unexpected Lessons in Love by Bernardine Bishop (2013): I loved Bishop’s The Street, and this posthumous novel initially drew me in with its medical detail (two friends who both had stoma operations) and the exploration of different forms of love – romantic, parental, grandparental – before starting to feel obvious (two adoptions, one historical and one recent), maudlin and overlong. With some skimming, I made it to page 120. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
Other relevant reading on the go:
I would have tried spinning this one into another thematic trio, but ran out of time…
A Rough Guide to the Heart by Pam Houston (1999): A mix of personal essays and short travel pieces. The material about her dysfunctional early family life, her chaotic dating, and her thrill-seeking adventures in the wilderness is reminiscent of the highly autobiographical Waltzing the Cat. Amusingly, this has a previous price label from Richard Booth’s Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, where it was incorrectly classed as Romance Fiction – one could be excused the mistake based on the title and cover! (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project)
And three books about marriage…
The Honesty Box by Lucy Brazier – A pleasant year’s diary of rural living and adjusting to her husband’s new diagnosis of neurodivergence.- Strangers by Belle Burden – A high-profile memoir about her husband’s strange and marriage-ending behaviour (his affair was only part of it) during the 2020 lockdown.
- Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell – For Literary Wives Club in March. I’m in the early pages but it seems comparable to Richard Yates.
#NovNov25 and #GermanLitMonth: Kästner, Kehlmann & Kracht
Our trip to Germany in September whetted my appetite to read more German-language fiction, and November also being German Literature Month (hosted this year by Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat and Tony of Tony’s Reading List) was a perfect excuse. K names only this year, please. (Perhaps next year I’ll make it S and finally get to those Sebald and Seethaler novels I have on the shelf.) These three works – a children’s classic, a set of linked short stories about the writer’s craft, and a mother–son spending spree – have coy metafictional touches, plus there’s a connection I wasn’t expecting between the Kehlmann and Kracht. All:
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner (1929; 1931)
[Translated by Eileen Hall]
If only I’d realized this was set on a train to Berlin, I could have read it in the same situation! Instead, it was a random find while shelving in the children’s section of the library. Emil sets out on a slow train from Neustadt to stay with his aunt, grandmother and cousin in Berlin for a week’s holiday. His mother gives him £7 in an envelope he pins inside his coat for safekeeping. There are four adults in the carriage with him, but three get off early, leaving Emil alone with a man in a bowler hat. Much as he strives to stay awake, Emil drops off. No sooner has the train pulled into Berlin than he realizes the envelope is gone along with his fellow traveller. “There were four million people in Berlin at that moment, and not one of them cared what was happening to Emil Tischbein.” He’s sure he’ll have to chase the man in the bowler hat all by himself, but instead he enlists the help of a whole gang of boys, including Gustav who carries a motor-horn and poses as a bellhop, Professor with the glasses, and Little Tuesday who mans the phone lines. Together they get justice for Emil, deliver a wanted criminal to the police, and earn a hefty reward. This was a cute story and it was refreshing for children’s word to be taken seriously. There’s also the in-joke of the journalist who interviews Emil being Kästner. I’m sure as a kid I would have found this a thrilling adventure, but the cynical me of today deemed it unrealistic. (Public library) [153 pages]
Fame by Daniel Kehlmann (2009; 2010)
[Translated by Carol Brown Janeway]
I’ve been equally enchanted by Kehlmann’s historical fiction (Measuring the World) and contemporary metafiction (F is one of my all-time favourites) in the past. These nine linked stories feature writers and their characters, actors and their look-alikes, and are about how life translates into – or is sometimes transformed by – art. Ralf Tanner starts to feel like he doesn’t exist when his calls gets diverted to someone else’s phone and an impersonator is more convincing at playing him than he is himself. Leo Richter’s new girlfriend is curiously similar to his most famous character, Lara Gaspard, a doctor working for a medical charity. Crime writer Maria Rubinstein takes Leo’s place on a cultural exchange to Central Asia and gets stuck in a Kafka-esque situation without a visa. Leo’s fan and Ralf’s call recipient are subjects of their own stories. References to Miguel Auristos Blanco’s spiritual self-help books recur and he, too, eventually becomes a character. I liked the pointed little jokes about what writers have to put up with (“Do you know how often I’ve been asked today where I get my ideas from? Fourteen. And nine times whether I work in the morning or the afternoon,” Leo complains). Mostly, these stories struck me as clever yet had me wondering what the point was. My favourite was “Rosalie Goes Off to Die,” in which Leo’s character travels to Zurich for an assisted death but he the writer decides to interfere before she can get her last wish. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) [206 pages – but fairly large print]
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (2021; 2024)
[Translated by Daniel Bowles]
This was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and is the current Waterstones book of the month. The Swiss author’s seventh novel appears to be autofiction: the protagonist is named Christian Kracht and there are references to his previous works. Whether he actually went on a profligate road trip with his 80-year-old mother, who could say. I tend to think some details might be drawn from life – her physical and mental health struggles, her father’s Nazism, his father’s weird collections and sexual predilections – but brewed into a madcap maelstrom of a plot that sees the pair literally throwing away thousands of francs. Her fortune was gained through arms industry investment and she wants rid of it, so they hire private taxis and planes. If his mother has a whim to pick some edelweiss, off they go to find it. All the while she swigs vodka and swallows pills, and Christian changes her colostomy bags. I was wowed by individual lines (“This was the katabasis: the decline of the family expressed in the topography of her face”; “everything that does not rise into consciousness will return as fate”; “the glacial sun shone from above, unceasing and relentless, upon our little tableau vivant”) but was left chilly overall by the satire on the ultra-wealthy and those who seek to airbrush history. The fun connections: Like the Kehlmann, this involves arbitrary travel and happens to end in Africa. More than once, Kracht is confused for Kehlmann. (Little Free Library) [190 pages]
Spotted in my local Waterstones…
The BBC National Short Story Award 2025 Anthology
Another quick contribution to #ShortStorySeptember. I was delighted when Comma Press sent me a surprise copy of The BBC National Short Story Award 2025, which prints the five stories shortlisted for this year’s prize.
Now in its 20th year, the award has recognised established authors and newcomers alike – the roster of winners includes Lucy Caldwell, Sarah Hall (twice), Cynan Jones, James Lasdun, KJ Orr, Ingrid Persaud, Ross Raisin, Lionel Shriver and Naomi Wood – and the £15,000 prize money is very generous indeed for a single story.
This very evening, the winner will be announced live on the BBC Radio 4 Front Row programme (it starts at 7:15 p.m. if you’re in the UK). I’ll update my post later with news of the winner. For now, here are my brief thoughts on the five stories and which I hope will win.
“You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle” is an excerpt from Colwill Brown’s linked short story collection, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh. It’s in broad Doncaster dialect and written in the second person, thus putting the reader into the position of a young woman who is often pressured – by men and by the prevailing standards of beauty – into uncomfortable situations. It’s all drinking and sex and feeling in competition with other girls. ‘You’ grow up limited and bitter and wondering if revenge is possible. This was admirable for its gritty realism but not pleasant per se, and convinced me I don’t want to read the whole book.
“Little Green Man” by Edward Hogan begins with a classic scenario of two very different people being thrown together. Carrie stands out not just for being nearly six feet tall but also for being the only woman working for Parks and Gardens in Derby. One morning she’s assigned a temporary apprentice, Ryan, who is half her age and might be dismissed with one look as being no good (“lines shaved into his eyebrows … dyed blond hair” and a baby at home). But their interactions go beyond stereotypes as we learn of Ryan’s ambitions and his disapproving dad; and of Carrie’s ex, Bridget, who wanted more spontaneity. It’s a solid, feel-good story about not making your mind up about people, in the vein of Groundskeeping.
“Yair” by Emily Abdeni-Holman is another two-character drama, with the title figure an Israeli estate agent who takes the female narrator looking for an apartment in Jerusalem in 2018. Sexual tension and conflicting preconceived notions are crackling between them. A simple story with an autofiction feel, it reminded me of writing by Sigrid Nunez and Elizabeth Strout and exposes the falsity of facile us-and-them distinctions.
“Two Hands” by Caoilinn Hughes is a three-player comedy starring a married couple and their driving instructor. After a motorway crash in the beloved Fiat Panda they brought with them from Italy when they moved back to Ireland, Desmond and Gemma are in need of some renewed confidence behind the wheel. They talk about work – Des’s ancient archaeology research, Gemma’s translations – but not about the accident, which clearly is still affecting them both. Meanwhile, their late-seventies instructor is a War and Peace-reading calm presence whose compassion stretches only so far. I found this sharp, witty and original, just like Hughes’s Orchid & the Wasp.
Last but not least, “Rain: a history” by Andrew Miller is set in a sodden near-future English village. The protagonist has been having heart trouble and failing to connect with his traumatized teenage son. Nothing in his house or on his person ever feels dry. Their surroundings are menacing and desolate, yet still somehow beautiful. A letter came through the door last week, inviting everyone to meet in the parish church this evening. What can be done? Perhaps solidarity is as much as they, and we, can hope for. This was spare and haunting, and so much better than The Land in Winter.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading these entries and wouldn’t mind four out of the five winning. My sense of the spirit of the award is that it should go to a stand-alone story by an up-and-coming author. It’s hard to say what judges William Boyd, Lucy Caldwell, Ross Raisin, Kamila Shamsie and Di Speirs will go for: realism, novelty, subtlety, humour or prophecy? My personal favourite was “Yair,” but I have an inkling the award might go to Caoilinn Hughes and I would be very happy with that result as well.
With thanks to Comma Press for the free copy for review.
UPDATE: The winner was … the story I enjoyed the least, “You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle.” Nonetheless, I acknowledge that Colwill Brown has a distinctive voice.
#ShortStorySeptember: Stories by Katherine Heiny, Shena Mackay and Ian McEwan
Every September I enjoy focusing on short stories, which I seem to read at a rate of only one or two collections per month in the rest of a year. This year, Lisa of ANZ Lit Lovers is hosting Short Story September as a blogger challenge for the first time. She’s encouraging people to choose individual short stories they would recommend, so I’ll be centring all of my reviews around one particular story but also giving my reaction to the collections as a whole.
“Dark Matter”
from
Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny (2015)
“One week in late February, Rhodes and Gildas-Joseph told Maya the same come fact, that there was a movement to reinstate Plato’s status as a planet.”
Maya is engaged to Rhodes but also sleeping with Gildas-Joseph, the director of the university library where she works. She’s one of Heiny’s typical whip-smart, exasperated protagonists, irresistibly drawn to a man or two even though they seem like priggish or ridiculous bores (witness the “come fact” above – neither can stop himself from mansplaining after sex). Having an affair means always having to keep your wits about you. Maya bumps into her boss with his wife, Adèle, at a colleague’s cocktail party and in line for the movies, and one day her fiancé’s teenage sister, Magellan (seriously, what is up with these names?!), turns up at the coffee shop where she is supposed to be meeting Gildas-Joseph. Quick, act natural. By the end, Maya knows that she must decide between the two men.
This is the middle of a trio of stories about Maya. They’re not in a row and I read the book over quite a number of months, so I was in danger of forgetting that we’d met this set of characters before. In the first, the title story, Maya has been with Rhodes for five years but is thinking of leaving him – and not just because she’s crushing on her boss. A health crisis with her dog leads her to rethink. In “Grendel’s Mother,” Maya is pregnant and hoping that she and her partner are on the same page.
This triptych of linked stories is evidence that Heiny was working her way towards a novel, and I certainly prefer Standard Deviation and Early Morning Riser. However, I really liked Heiny’s 2023 story collection, Games and Rituals, which has much more variety.
I like the second person as much as anyone but three instances of “You” narration is too much. The best of these was “The Rhett Butlers,” about a teenager whose history teacher uses famous character names as aliases when checking them into motels for trysts. The cover image is from this story: “The part of your life that contains him is too sealed off, like the last slice of cake under one of those glass domes.”
Although all of these stories are entertaining and have some of the insouciance and bittersweetness of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, they are so overwhelmingly about adultery (the main theme of at least 8 of 11) that they feel one-note.
why have an affair if not to say bad things about your spouse?
She thought that was the essence of motherhood: acting like you knew what you were talking about when you didn’t. That, and looking at people’s rashes. It was probably why people had affairs.
I would recommend any of Heiny’s other books over this one, but I wanted to read everything she’s published and I wouldn’t say my time spent on this was a waste. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) 
“All the Pubs in Soho”
from
Dreams of Dead Women’s Handbags by Shena Mackay (1987)
“It was his father’s vituperation about ‘those bloody pansies at Old Hollow’ that had brought Joe to the cottage on this empty summer holiday afternoon.”
It’s 1956 in Kent and Joe is only eight years old, so it’s not too surprising that, ignorant of the slang, he shows up at Arthur and Guido’s expecting to find flowers dripping red. Their place becomes his haven from a home full of crying, excreting younger siblings and a conventional father who intends to send him to a private girls’ school in the autumn. That’s right, “Joe” is Josephine, who likes to wear boys’ clothes and insists on a male name. Mackay struck me as ahead of her time (rather like Rose Tremain with Sacred Country) in honouring Joe’s chosen pronouns and letting him imagine an adult future in which he’d keep company with Arthur and Guido’s bohemian, artistic set – the former is a poet, the latter a painter – and they’d take him round ‘all the pubs in Soho.’ But in a sheltered small town where everyone has a slur ready for the men, it is not to be. Things don’t end well, but thankfully not as badly as I was hoping, and Joe has plucked up the courage to resist his father. There’s all the emotional depth and character development of a novella in this 26-page story.
I’ve had a mixed experience with Mackay, but the one novel of hers I got on well with, The Orchard on Fire, also dwells on the shattered innocence of childhood. By contrast, most of the stories in this collection are grimy ones about lonely older people – especially elderly women – reminding me of Barbara Comyns or Barbara Pym at her darkest. “Where the Carpet Ends,” about the long-term residents of a shabby hotel, recalls The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. In “Violets and Strawberries in the Snow,” a man in a mental institution awaits a holiday visit from his daughters. “What do we do now?” he asks a fellow inmate. “We could hang ourselves in the tinsel” is the reply. It’s very black comedy indeed. The same is true of a Halloween-set story that I’ll revisit next month.
The cover is so bad it’s good, amirite? In the title story, Susan Vigo is on her way by train to give a speech at a writers’ workshop and running through possible plots for her mystery novel in progress. “Slaves to the Mushroom” is another great one that takes place on a mushroom farm. Mackay’s settings are often surprising, her vocabulary precise, and her portraits of young people as cutting as those of the aged are pitiful. This would serve as a great introduction to her style. (Secondhand – Slightly Foxed Books, Berwick)
“The Grown-up”
from
The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan (1994)
“The following morning Peter Fortune woke from troubled dreams to find himself transformed into a giant person, an adult.”
A much better Kafka homage, this, than that forgettable novella The Cockroach that McEwan published in 2019. Every story of this linked collection features Peter, a 10-year-old with a very active imagination. Three of the stories are straightforward body-swap narratives (with his sister’s mangled doll, his cat, or his baby cousin), whereas in this one he’s not trading with anyone else but still experiencing what it’s like to be someone else. In this case, a young man falling in love for the first time. Just the previous day, at the family’s holiday cottage in Cornwall, he’d been bemoaning how boring adults are: all they want to do is sit on the beach and chat or read, when there’s so much world out there to explore and turn into a personal playground. He never wants to be one of them. Now he realizes there are different ways to enjoy life; “he stopped and turned to look at the grown-ups one more time. … He felt differently about them now. There were things they knew and liked which for him were only just appearing, like shapes in a mist. There were adventures ahead of him after all.”
Of course, I also loved “The Cat,” which Eleanor mentioned when she read my review of Matt Haig’s To Be a Cat. At the time, I’d not heard of this and couldn’t believe McEwan had written something suitable for kids! These stories were ones he read aloud to his children as he composed them. There is a hint of gruesomeness in “The Dolls,” but most are just playful. “Vanishing Cream” is a cautionary tale about wanting your family to go away. In “The Bully,” Peter turns a bully into a tentative friend. “The Baby” sees him changing his mind about an annoying relative, while “The Burglar” has him imagining himself a hero who stops the spate of neighbourhood break-ins. Events are explained away as literal dreams, daydreams or a bit of magic. This was an offbeat gem. Try it for a very different taste of McEwan! (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
20 Books of Summer, 6–7: Helen Dunmore and Stephen King
At least, I managed a pretty terrific pair, and completed half of my intended 4-in-a-row (the second row) on the Bingo card.
(Book featuring ice cream or summer foods)
Ice Cream by Helen Dunmore (2000)
These 18 pieces are quite varied: a few have historical settings, two are written in the second person, and several return to the life of Ulli (a recurring character from Love of Fat Men), a Finnish teenager who faces an unexpected pregnancy. Even the slight-seeming ones are satisfying slices of fiction. The title story and its follow-up, “Be Vigilant, Rejoice, Eat Plenty” advocate sensual indulgence, which I guess is the reason for the cover image – which I couldn’t decide whether to hide or flaunt as I was reading it in public.
Often, there is a hint of menace, whether the topic is salmon fishing, raspberry picking or the history of a lost ring. “The Clear and Rolling Water” has the atmosphere of a Scottish folk ballad, which made it perfect reading for our recent holiday to Scotland. “Leonardo, Michelangelo, SuperStork” and “Mason’s Mini-break” stand out for their dystopian and magic realist touches, respectively. In the former, couples are only allowed to conceive via state- sanctioned services; in the latter, an arrogant Booker Prize-winning author is patronizing when he meets a would-be writer while on holiday in Yorkshire.
Two of my favourites were “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife” and “Swimming into the Millennium,” which might have been written by Helen Simpson. All are of a high standard, and though they don’t fit together per se and mostly won’t stay with me, I really do rate Dunmore as a short story writer. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
(Book from a genre you rarely read)
Pet Sematary by Stephen King (1983)
I’d only ever read King’s On Writing and worried I wouldn’t be able to handle his fiction. I could never watch a horror film, but somehow the same content was okay in print. For half the length or more, it’s more of a mildly dread-laced, John Irving-esque novel about how we deal with the reality of death. Dr. Louis Creed and his family – wife Rachel, five-year-old daughter Ellie, two-year-old son Gage and cat Church (short for Winston Churchill) – have recently moved from Chicago to Maine for him to take up a post as head of University Medical Services. Their 83-year-old neighbour across the street, Judson Crandall, becomes a sort of surrogate father to Louis, warning them about the dangerous highway that separates their houses and initiating them with a tour of the pet cemetery and Micmac burial ground that happen to be on their property. Things start getting weird early on: Louis’s first day on the job sees a student killed by a car while jogging; the young man’s cryptic dying words are about the pet cemetery, and he then visits Louis in a particularly vivid dream.
The family surname is no coincidence. “I believe that we go on,” Louis says when Ellie asks him about what happens when we die. “But as to what it’s like, I have no opinion.” So King interrogates what it would be like for the dead to go on literally instead of just figuratively in the remembrance of loved ones. Would bringing the dead back be a cure for grief or a horrible mistake? This sleepy New England town harbours many cautionary tales, and the Creeds have more than their fair share of sorrow. Rachel witnessed her sister’s death from a long illness when she was just a child and has always repressed her memories of it.
Louis is a likable protagonist whose vortex of obsession and mental health (“He walked the balance-beam of rationality”) is gripping. As can be the case with genre fiction, King prioritizes readability over writing quality, though I did pick out an occasional glistening metaphor. It doesn’t get gruesome or schlocky until right towards the end. In the last quarter, which I read on the long train ride home from Edinburgh, I couldn’t get the book closer to my face or the pages turning any faster. It helped that it was a beat-up small-format paperback. When we arrived into London I was about six pages from the end and it was so frustrating to have to wait until I got on my next train to read the rest.
This also counted towards one of my low-key ongoing challenges: reading works published in my birth year. I could imagine the Eighties stylings of an adaptation, especially Rachel’s power suit and pumps when she’s on her race-against-the-clock flight and road trip. I did find the book dated in some of its Murakami-like descriptions (“The … double doors were set into a grassy rise of hill, a shape as natural and as attractive as the swell of a woman’s breast”) and cringey sex scenes, and I wondered if King would get away with using imagery of the Windigo these days. Still, on this evidence, I’ll seek out more of his classic horror – do give me your recommendations. So long as they’re this addictive (and no scarier), I’m game. Pet Sematary was sterling entertainment, but also surprisingly poignant. A message I took away: you just have to live with the pain of loss, not fight it or deny it. “When it started not to hurt, it started not to matter.” (Little Free Library) 
20 Books of Summer, 1–3: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daisy Johnson & Ruth Padel
It’s been a slow start to #20BooksofSummer2025 for me, but I’ll hope to do some catching up during our Scotland holiday and then once we’re home in July. So far, I’m sticking to the list I chose last month. These first few were slightly disappointing, to be honest, but I have no doubt I’ll find some gems among my original selections.
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2025)
This was one of my Most Anticipated books of the year and had a lot to live up to as Adichie’s first novel since the amazing Americanah. When I first attempted to read it, I was dismayed by how much it felt like a rehashing of Americanah, with Chia (a travel writer in Maryland) and her cousin Omelogor (a feminist blogger) together reminiscent of Ifemelu. It did get more readable and somewhat more interesting as it went on. But instead of finding the narration and structure natural, I ended up full of questions about what Adichie intended.
Why four main characters? Why is it the one non-Nigerian who’s poor, victimized, and less proficient in English? (That Kadiatou is based on a real person doesn’t explain enough. Her plight does at least provide what plot there is.) Why are the other three, to varying extents, rich and pretentious? Why are two narratives in the first person and two in the third person? Why in such long chunks instead of switching the POV more often? Why so many men, all of them more or less useless? (All these heterosexual relationships – so boring!) Why bring Covid into it apart from for verisimilitude? But why is the point in time important? What point is she trying to convey about pornography, the subject of Omelogor’s research?
It’s Adichie, so of course she writes solid prose with engaging characters, convincing dialogue, and provocative ideas. There’s a focus here on women’s experiences of attempted or actual motherhood (e.g., PMDD, fibroids, single parenthood or pressure to adopt), and, as per usual, a bit about race (specifically colorism, ethnic prejudice, and code-switching). But the characters’ connections seem weak, their coverage of the range of women’s experiences narrow. The title is, I suppose, the best clue to what Adichie wanted to do with the novel. Everyone dreams of finding, or preserving, love and family. Chia yearns for someone who will truly know her, and because she’s convinced this will be a romantic bond she devotes lockdown to a mental inventory of past relationships. Kadiatou dreams of peace more than of justice, and only in that she gets what she wants is there a happy ending of sorts. I wish I could be more positive, but this was a slog for me. (New purchase – Hungerford Bookshop)
The Hotel by Daisy Johnson (2024)
I’d really enjoyed Johnson’s two novels, Everything Under and Sisters, and have a copy of her previous short story collection, Fen, on the shelf. This completely passed my notice last year. I liked the idea of eerie linked short stories, but I wish I’d known this was originally written for radio as I think it accounts for how simplistic and insubstantial the 15 tales are.
The Hotel is a fenland folly, built on the site of a pond where a suspected witch was drowned. Ever after, it is a cursed place. Those who build the hotel and stay in it are subject to violence, fear, and eruptions of the unexplained – especially if they go in Room 63. Anyone who visits once seems doomed to return. Most of the stories are in the first person, which makes sense for dramatic monologues. The speakers are guests, employees, and monsters. Some are BIPOC or queer, as if to tick off demographic boxes. Just before the Hotel burns down in 2019, it becomes the subject of an amateur student film like The Blair Witch Project.
Scary books don’t tend to work for me because I am often too aware of how they are constructed and so fail to give myself over to the reading experience and take them seriously. I can’t summon much enthusiasm for these stories, though I suppose the setting is rather atmospheric. My favourite was “Infestation,” about two girls – the one (not randomly) named Shirley – who think they discover something down in the laundry room in 1968. Only one of them makes it out alive. Okay, this one was creepy, but the rest left me unmoved. (Gift – purchased with Hungerford Bookshop with Christmas token) 
Girl by Ruth Padel (2024)
Padel is one of my favourite poets and a repeat appearance on my summer reading list; I reviewed her Emerald in 2021. I’ve read 12 of her books now. This collection is about girlhood, by way of personal history and myth.
The first section, “When the Angel Comes for You,” is about the Virgin Mary, its 15 poems corresponding to the 15 Mysteries of the Rosary (as Padel explains in a note at the end; had she not, that would have gone over my head). The opening poem about the Annunciation is the most memorable its contemporary imagery emphasizing Mary’s youth and naivete: “a flood of real fear / and your heart / in the cowl-neck T-shirt from Primark / suddenly convulsed. But your old life // now seems dry as a stubbed / cigarette.” The third section, “Lady of the Labyrinth,” is about Ariadne, inspired by the snake goddess figurines in a museum on Crete. The message here is the same: “there is always the question of power / and girl is a trajectory / of learning how to deal with it”.
But the only poems that truly stood out to me are in the central autobiographical section arising from Padel’s own girlhood as well as her observations of her daughter and grandchild (setting up a Maiden–Mother–Crone triad). “Girl in a Forest” and “Tomboy and Panther” draw on the lure of the jungle to depict a wild child who chooses trousers over skirts. I loved “Fair Verona” for its traveler’s nostalgia but also for the hint of menace: so many tourists fondled the breast on a statue of Juliet that it had to be replaced. “How much touching // does it take for a bronze breast to crack?” the poet asks.
There’s some good alliteration throughout, and I warmed to the vision of girlhood as a time of promise and possibility: “the wonder / the where shall I go what new thing / will this day bring of being a girl.” Overall, though, I didn’t think the book had a lot of substance to convey about its theme. (Gift – purchased with Hungerford Bookshop with Christmas token)
Off to Scotland today. I’ve packed Ice Cream by Helen Dunmore and Pet Sematary by Stephen King from my 20 Books list, plus other books I may substitute in. I’m scheduling a few posts for while we’re away; forgive me if I don’t reply to comments until July.
10th Blogging Anniversary! & Thoughts on the Women’s Prize and Carol Shields Prize Longlists
I can hardly believe I’ve been blogging for a decade. It seems like no time ago that I started this site on a whim early in my freelance career, soon after my main online publication folded and my brother-in-law died. This is now my 1,486th blog post (so close to that 1,500 milestone!), which means I average 12 posts a month. Between reviews, challenges, memes, book lists, and prize reactions, I maintain a very active blog. I’ve long since stopped caring about numbers of views and likes; I’ll never be a top influencer but I offer quality, thoughtful content for those who are similarly serious about books. The blog has also become a place where I can write about personal things in response to losses and other life changes.
I’m pleased that my blog anniversary happens to coincide with International Women’s Day, around when the Women’s Prize and Carol Shields Prize longlists are announced. I don’t plan to shadow either prize in a concerted way, partly because I’m too busy with reading debut novels in my role as a McKitterick Prize judge, but there are some books that appeal.
Women’s Prize Longlist
Read
- The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
- Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
- The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Reading
- Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- All Fours by Miranda July
Already Wanted to Read
- Birding by Rose Ruane – For the cover if nothing else (it made my Cover Love post last year)
- The Artist by Lucy Steeds – Susan of A life in books rates it highly: see her review.
Unsure
- A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike – The premise is reasonably appealing (an orphan who pretends to be an angel) but I am very much not keen on medieval settings. I’ll wait and see if it’s shortlisted.
Decided Against
- Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings – I read the Booker-longlisted An Island and it was fine but I don’t need to try anything else by her.
- Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell – 400 pages on an Irish domestic violence situation sounds like A Lot. Reviews have been very favourable, saying it’s as pacey as a thriller. Again, I’ll wait to see if it’s shortlisted.
Not Interested (for now)
- Good Girl by Aria Aber
- Somewhere Else by Jenni Daiches
- Amma by Saraid de Silva (but well done to Weatherglass Books!)
- The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
- The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji
- Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
The blurbs for these don’t attract me, but I’d be willing to change my mind if I see an enthusiastic review or two.
[Shortlist: 2 April; winner: 12 June]
Stab-in-the-dark shortlist predictions: Good Girl, Dream Count, The Dream Hotel, Nesting, The Artist, Tell Me Everything
Carol Shields Prize Longlist
Read
- Liars by Sarah Manguso
DNF
- Cicada Summer by Erica McKeen – I read the first 15% last summer. In 2020, Husha has recently lost her mother and is locked down with her grandfather at his Ontario lake house. I recall that the prose was vague and somewhat obnoxiously poetic.
Reading
- All Fours by Miranda July – The only overlap with the WP. I don’t think that, as happened last year, the repeated title will be the winner. It’s too offbeat and divisive.
Want to Read
- The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan – Novella-length autofiction about adapting to disability.
- Curiosities by Anne Fleming – A historian becomes obsessed with the story told by five 17th-century manuscripts. Sounds like a queer Possession with a dash of North Woods.
- Pale Shadows by Dominique Fortier, translated by Rhonda Mullins – A Québécois author takes on the legacy of Emily Dickinson via the three women who first brought her poetry into print.
- Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento – Linked short stories about Zambians and Zambian émigrés.
Unsure
- Bear by Julia Phillips – After reading Bear by Marian Engel, I don’t think I need any more bear legend-inspired romances in my life. (I already discounted Eowyn Ivey’s latest.)
- Kin: Practically True Stories by V Efua Prince – I’ve had good luck with other books from Wayne State University Press’ Made in Michigan series but can’t quite work out what this would be like.
- Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances by Sharon Wahl – Could be intriguing; could be pretentious. At least it’s only novella length. All I can do is try an excerpt.
Not Interested (for now)
- Naniki by Oonya Kempadoo – Someone on Goodreads described this as being like spoken word at a sci-fi convention.
- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner – I wasn’t keen when it was shortlisted for the Booker, and I haven’t changed my mind.
- River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure – Ditto but from last year’s WP list.
- Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin – Normally I like linked short stories but a 400+ page count and the heavy subject matter of slavery regulations sound overwhelming.
- Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi – I struggle with fantasy at the best of times.
[Shortlist: 3 April; winner: 1 May]
Last year Laura T. and I covered most of the longlist between us and really enjoyed the project. (Marcie of Buried in Print also reviewed a lot of the longlist later in the year.) This year we’ll reassess at the shortlist stage and maybe request a few review copies from the publicist. See Laura’s prize longlist reactions here.
Stab-in-the-dark shortlist predictions: Curiosities, Obligations to the Wounded, Creation Lake, Code Noir, Masquerade
What have you read, or might you read, from these longlists?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 