SHORT STORIES

EITHNE FARRY

ANIMAL PERSON by Alexander MacLeod

(Jonathan Cape €23.79, 256 pp) THE eight stories in Alexander MacLeod’s excellent second collection, composed in crystalline prose, glimmer and gleam with yearning and loss, as strange longings overwhelm his finely-drawn characters.

We meet a 1970s criminal, with a penchant for stealing luggage from airports, who is captivated by a majorette’s suitcase (What Exactly Do You Think You’re Looking At?) and a serial killer who’s surprisingly pleasant to the family staying in an adjacent motel room (The Closing Date).

Elsewhere, a piano concert goes wonderfully awry as an elderly dementia patient and a reluctant student tackle a tricky piece of music in the evocative, moving The Entertainer.

WE MOVE by Gurnaik Johal

(Serpent’s Tail

€18.19, 240 pp) SOUTHALL, Ealing and the highways and byways of West London are the settings for these superbly engaging stories by 23-yearold Gurnaik Johal, who skilfully captures the interconnected lives of its Punjabi community as families and estranged friends attempt to navigate the shifting currents of their changeable relationships.

Conversational, brimful of beautifully observed descriptions of the sights and sounds of this world, he’s especially brilliant at writing about food, its flavours and its unifying significance in lives of his characters, from the bucket of chicken eaten by Gujan and his reclusive baba after an impromptu bike ride (Leave To Remain) to the Battenberg cake that’s savoured by Miriam and Mont in a retirement home alongside their shared, made-up memories of romance in the lovely, lonesome Be More Roy.

OUT THERE by Kate Folk (Hodder Studio, €23.79, 256 pp)

KATE FOLK’S short stories are wonderfully weird; playfully pushing the possibilities of plotlines towards the uncanny, creepy and off-kilter, they have a seam of dark humour that illuminates the grotesquery with an unnerving beauty.

Here houses aren’t havens; instead a mysterious head pushes its way through the floorboards, a home demands constant moisturising to keep it safe and unblemished, and a student rental comes with a brain in the attic and a stomach in the upstairs hallway that slowly digests the inhabitants (The House’s Beating Heart).

Dating is dangerous as ‘blots’, a fleet of biomorphic robots, target unsuspecting women to steal their internet data (Big Sur), and romance ruinous as lovers harvest slivers of hearts, lungs and kidneys, erotically attracted by thoughts of organs pulsing beneath a thin layer of skin.