SHORT STORIES

THE DREAMS OF BETHANY MELLMOTH by William Boyd (Viking £14.99)

ThE titular Bethany Mellmoth is 24 and adrift. She has artistic ambitions — to be an actor or a novelist or a photographer. But, somehow, life and circumstances conspire against her — including her complicated relationship with her divorced parents.

Boyd could go in for the kill; a takedown of youthful vanity and vainglory.

But instead, there’s a mellow, sharp humour to Bethany’s lacklustre attempts to achieve something. Not so funny are the justifications of serial adulterer Luke Abernathy, in The Man Who Liked Kissing Women, whose feckless foibles are mercilessly recounted.

A change of pace (one of many in this varied, entertaining collection) comes with the exhilarating fun of The Vanishing Game: An Adventure and its ludicrously enjoyable premise — an actor unwittingly becomes involved in a sinister car chase and must use skills he developed for movie roles to outwit the bad guys.

IN WHITE INK by Elske Rahill

(Apollo Lilliput £18.99) ThE challenging nature of relationships and motherhood are examined in this exquisite, savagely honest collection. The standout story is In White Ink, a devastating account of a young mother attempting to protect her young child from her sneering, abusive former partner, where domestic drudgery, horrifying abuse and maternal tenderness are described with a disquieting exactness: ‘ The tedium of slumber rape, the horror of daily sniping . . . his laugh a spray of bullets — huh huh, huh huh, huh . . . cleaning the toilet.’

A sense of unease pervades the whole collection, from the brittle desire to maintain a facade of perfection with shocking consequences for the flea-ridden, but beloved, family dog (Toby), to the uncontrollable emotional outburst of a woman whose apparently lovely life has a hollowness at its heart (Bride)

Bleak, but acutely insightful.

THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT by Jen Campbell

(Two Roads £14.99) ThERE is dark enchantment in these wonderfully strange tales from former bookseller Jen Campbell, a sense of the magical jostling up against the mundane, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

There’s a visceral vividness in Animal (‘That’s why I bought her heart online’) as the narrator attempts to dissect love, and a lovely melancholy to the title story where, in the dark of night, a couple contemplates beginnings and endings.

Mining myths and fairy tales, Campbell gives voice to the outsiders, misfits and lost souls in the most mesmerising way.