SHORT STORIES
GIRL, BALANCING & OTHER STORIES by Helen Dunmore (Hutchinson £20) HeLen dunmore’s love of history glints and gleams in this elegant, posthumous collection.
it is beautifully displayed in esther To Fanny, in which she celebrates the writer Fanny Burney, who underwent an excruciating, life-extending mastectomy and is the perfect representative of the 18th-century’s ‘small, fierce, brave people who dressed elaborately, smelled awful . . . and worshipped Reason’.
Meanwhile, in the glorious Taken in shadows, it’s the poet John donne who is subjected to a passionate and wryly speculative investigation.
But it is the four nina stories that shine, as a young girl learns the lessons of self-sufficiency and self-defence and, in the titular tale, makes a hasty exit from an aggressive acquaintance on her rollerskates, ‘all of her blazing and triumphant’.
FLORIDA by Lauren Groff (William Heinemann £14.99) LaURen GROFF’s bestselling novel Fates and Furies brilliantly dissected a marriage. Here, she turns her scalpel-sharp gaze on Florida, a state that is home to many dangers — panthers, pythons and hurricanes.
But the real peril for her lonely characters lies in the unpredictable nature of their emotional lives. Outside is the wide, wild world; inside, the equally feral nature of ferocious domesticity.
The wonderful opening story, Ghosts and empties, sets the tone: the narrator realises she has become ‘a woman who yells’ and takes to wandering the twilight streets of her little town to escape the ‘frozen, watchful faces’ of her children, revealing the injurious, sometimes joyous, aspects of motherhood in this lyrical, lacerating collection.
BACK TALK by Danielle Lazarin (Blackfriars £8.99) danieLLe LazaRin dives into the lives of new York girls and women with a quiet, melancholic exactitude.
she carefully reveals the way hidden desires and unresolved emotions can whirlpool away life’s certainties.
in Floor Plans, a couple undergoing a ‘mutual’ divorce ‘take sides, though we didn’t think there [were] sides to take’, in the sale of their apartment.
Meanwhile, in Landscape no.27, a married woman can’t help but wonder why her artist lover chose her, even as she half-heartedly wonders why she picked him.
The wavering bond between sisters is explored in The Holographic soul; while in appetite, a girl, mourning her mother, negotiates the world of relationships, sex and jealousy and can’t help but feel that all forms of love are ‘inked in suffering’.