SHORT STORIES

EITHNE FARRY CERTAIN AMERICAN STATES By Catherine Lacey (Granta, £12.99, 208pp) Catherine Lacey’s long, lingering sentences have an exquisite elegance about them; they unspool across the page, unravelling the feelings of characters who are lost, lonely, bereaved or mired in emotions that defy clear definition.

the stories often veer into unexpected directions, taking a surprising route along the pathways of grief.

a woman who doesn’t want to admit to herself emotionally that her husband has died thinks of herself instead as an ‘un-widow’ and gives away his clothes, but ‘ weeps athletically almost every day’ when he returns from the afterlife with a suitcase full of his dirty, given- away shirts ( Please Take).

in Family Physics a solitary woman eventually returns home to discover that her family declared her dead, while in ur

heck box — the title is taken from a misspelt text — communications of all kinds are scrambled by the characters’ careening, unresolved feelings and fears. Completely beautiful. THE DARK DARK By Samantha Hunt (Corsair £9.99, 256pp) SaMantha hunt’s three novels read like modern fables, with characters who travel on the trail of demons and ghosts, or believe themselves to be mermaids.

these stories, grounded in an often harsh reality, also have an eerie fairytale quality to them, as a woman is transformed into a deer ( Beast) and 13 pregnant teens wondrously float into the air by their school lockers ( All Hands).

Most of the stories are utterly beguiling (though Love

Machine, featuring a seductive robot, is unconvincing) with women on the verge of transformations of all kinds, and where the mundane jostles up against the marvellous.

hormones are akin to sorcery and magic — ‘ neither of them are believable or explainable’, and procreation and motherhood is equally mysterious: ‘My body made eyeballs and i have no idea how.’ Spellbinding.