Short stories about LOVE
ROAR by Cecelia Ahern, HarperCollins
Ahern – author of PS I Love You – sends powerful, roaring messages to women in 30 short stories. In The Woman Who Has Disappeared, a 58-year-old woman has been in hospital for six months as her body fades. She now has to stand in front of patterned wallpaper to be seen. A private professor, Elizabeth Montgomery, diagnoses that when the woman moved to New York to find love and a new life among the eight million inhabitants, she ceased to exist. She was lonelier than ever trying to live up to the appearances that “men are not required to”.
THE BUTCHERBIRD STORIES by A.S. Patrić, Transit Lounge
Miles Franklin-winning author Patrić takes on life’s big questions through the eyes of small people. Humanity abounds especially in HB when a boy and his mother visit a bereaved woman, who is sharpening a pencil with a knife over the kitchen sink. There are photos of her dead son all around the tiny apartment. The boy draws pictures with the pencil, but when it’s time to leave she gifts him it: “‘For your art,’ she said with a twisted smile … It sounded to the boy as if she had given him the pencil she’d sharpened with a butcher’s knife and told him it was for his heart.”
YOU THINK IT, I’LL SAY IT by Curtis Sittenfeld, Penguin
All about human misconceptions. In the eponymous story - The World Has Many Butterflies - married Julie plays the party game “I’ll think it, you say it,” suggested by cheeky married school-run dad Graham. Under a rare spotlight an overconfident Julie gets carried away bitching about the other mums. Julie’s had a great night and can’t stop thinking about Graham. When he leaves his wife, she makes an embarrassing, naive move on him. “You realise you were saying what you thought. I was never romantically interested in you,” he slams.
THE FIREFLIES OF AUTUMN by Moreno Giovannoni, Black Inc
“Migrants never arrive at their destination,” declares Giovannoni, a Tuscan émigré to Victoria. First up 90-yearold Ugo’s Tale: “You embark on a ship in Genoa, disembark on the other side of the world. You abandon memories and end up walking the streets of Fitzroy, with your unusual name that no-one can pronounce.” The Imbeciles and the Fig Tree is of sisters abandoned and left starving when their fig tree bears no fruit. “They wanted it to be strong for when their parents returned from America to show them they were worthy of their love.”