SHORT STORIES
BARCELONA
by Mary Costello
(Canongate £14.99, 192pp)
THE characters in Costello’s spare, unflinching second collection of short stories are often confined in cars, train carriages and hotel rooms, and at the mercy of their own constricted thoughts, which veer from the literature to the unknowability of their companions, to the ‘ doomed lives of animals’ whose visceral suffering haunts the pages of this book.
These elegant, emotionally
complex stories are not comfortable or comforting to read, but they are beautifully, bruisingly honest. Here, a woman moves in next door to an old lover, neither acknowledging the other or their past relationship (My little Pyromaniac), while in the marvellously insightful The Choc-Ice woman, Frances accompanies her brother’s coffin home, contemplating her strained marriage and the heart-breaking secrets contained within it.
FREE THERAPY by Rebecca Ivory (Jonathon Cape £16.99, 208pp)
WINCINGLY funny and winningly honest, this debut collection delves into the thoughts of self-defeating characters who are well versed in the language of
therapy, but are unable to take action on these hard-won insights.
They half-heartedly turn up for jobs they don’t enjoy, frantically fret about the future and have relationships that are emotionally damaging and physically draining. Take the ‘competitive and collaborative’ friendship, in Push and Pull, of teenage Tara and narrator sarah, whose unfounded accusations sunder a friendship; or the awkward sexual encounters, in Tiny wrestler, between frustratingly careless Rory and Diane, who’s keen to articulate her feelings about their disconnection.
THE HIVE AND THE HONEY by Paul Yoon (Scribner £14.99, 160pp)
YOON’s bittersweet, beautifully
honed stories send his Korean characters away to new landscapes, where they set about creating families and friendships in often unwelcoming settings.
we head out on the road in the Japanese Edo period, 1608, in the company of two sensitive samurai who are returning an orphaned Korean child to his kin (The Post station).
we encounter a restless, angry ghost in far-flung south Ussuri, (The Hive and The Honey), watch the plot twists and turns in the wonderful Komarov, set in the Costa Brava, as a mother is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may be her estranged son, and meet jailbird Bosun who ‘felt like he had come a long way . . . and that something great was going to happen . . . soon’.