SHORT STORIES

WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY by Lesley Nneka Arimah

(Tinder Press £14.99) This dazzling collection of sly, subversive stories, set in Nigeria and America, features headstrong, complicated, contrary heroines who venture into an unyielding world with yearning hearts, ready to face down the most intractable situations come what may.

in the opening story, The Future Looks Good, Ezinma fumbles with a door key and ‘doesn’t see what came behind her’ — a domino-fall of connected memories that leads to disaster.

in Light, a father cherishes his fierce, funny daughter — ‘she is his brightest ember and he would not have her dimmed’ — not quite realising that life, alongside her far more conventional mother, will do its level best to ‘wick the dew off her’. Brilliant.

THE WORLD TO COME by Jim Shepard

(Riverrun £16.99) iN TEN meticulously researched stories, shepard elegantly places the emotional dilemmas of morose, melancholy, misunderstood characters against backdrops that emphasise the vastness of the world and the smallness of their hopes and dreams.

in hMs Terror, a gloomy young man who’s been unlucky in love heads to the frozen North and endures bad weather, no food and inexorable physical decline — ‘ no- one has retained any vitality, so we accomplish what little we can very slowly, as if miming our own actions’.

Cretan Love song — a wonderful snippet of a story — heads to 1600 BC, where a tsunami and a dying man’s hopeless wish race towards a waiting woman, while in Telemachus, the weight of the ocean adds to the ‘ haze of inertia’ that engulfs a hapless submariner in world war ii.

THAT WAS A SHIVER by James Kelman

(Canongate £14.99) iN his ninth volume of short stories, Booker Prize-winner James Kelman pitches us into the restless, roving minds of a series of characters who are bamboozled by the world and the people who live in it, including themselves.

There isn’t much in the way of plot — instead, Kelman tracks the thoughts of a trucker who revisits a familiar town, a father who heads next-door to confront the neighbours about noise that’s keeping his children awake, and a man who buys a record that’s in the wrong sleeve and then loses his temper at a stall selling dinner sets.

Bus journeys, creative writing classes, the unexpected discovery of a bottle of strong cider in a ditch — all lead to interior dialogues, recited in a brilliantly realised scottish vernacular, in which the narrator describes what he sees and feels.

A disorderly progression of impression and imprecation that is beguiling or bewildering.