BOOK OF THE WEEK

YOU KNOW YOU WANT THIS by Kristen Roupenian, Jonathan Cape,

£12.99 (ebook £8.99).

★★★★★

THE centrepiece of this debut collection of stories is Cat Person, allegedly the first short story ever to go viral (after it appeared in The New Yorker in 2017).

It’s a powerful and subtle skewering of ‘toxic masculinity’. Another potent tale, The Good Guy, tells of a man who always disappoints because of his inability to love the person he’s with. His fantasies about women become violent, but in his bottomless passivity, even these are somehow not his fault. For The Night Runner, Kristen draws on her experience in the Peace Corps, while The Mirror, The Bucket And The Old Thigh Bone has more the flavour of a Gothic fairy tale. Some of the stories have endings that are indeterminate or ambiguous, as if the author wants us to decide what should happen next. Violence, cruelty or misunderstanding are never far away in these 12 stories.