Swoops of heartache and joy

THE TRUTH HAS ARMS AND LEGS

by Alice Fowler (Wall Press £9.99, 100pp)

POIGNANT and perfectly paced, these lovely stories lean towards happy outcomes, compassionate compromises, unexpectedly rewarding friendships and good deeds.

There’s hardships and heartache here, too, but Fowler’s relatable characters are interested in making the best of difficult situations, ranging from early onset dementia and adoption, to the death of a beloved son — where a hawthorn, hazel, spindle and blackthorn hedge mark his passing in the war (Jack’s Hedge).

Poised on the brink of a change, Jenny remembers ‘a man she saw now and then, in whose company she had unfurled like a rose’ (Becoming Your Best You), parents tell their daughter a truth about her birth (Something You Need To Know), while clever, disadvantaged, tenyear-old Maggie runs pellmell towards her future, like ‘the swift that skims the corn fields. Swooping and dipping’ in the Surrey Hills in the 1920s (The Race).

AFTER THE FUNERAL

by Tessa Hadley Jonathan Cape £18.99, 240pp)

FRAUGHT sibling dynamics, feckless bohemian parents, new relationships and old loves thread their way through the riveting stories in Hadley’s 12th book.

Told with elegance and ease, and burnished with a winning turn of phrase, her psychologically astute assessments of her (mostly) middle-class characters make these stories thrum with empathic emotional energy.

There are at-odds sisters, united by the loss of their mother, communally feeling how ‘sadness made its claim on them now, winding through all the daily clatter like a cool, long note played on a flute’ (The Bunty Club), while elsewhere a down- to- earth daughter coolly judges her flighty mum: ‘That was the way life was divided up between me and my mother. I knew things and she was beautiful,’ (My Mother’s Wedding); and an ex-wife remembers the annoying ‘scrupulous solicitousness’ of her husband in Dido’s Lament.

ZERO-SUM

by Joyce Carol Oates 4th Estate £16.99, 272pp)

THERE’S scant comfort to be had in these dark, unsettling stories from the prolific Oates.

Instead, there’s a disquieting violence simmering under her prolix prose, a shrill alarm of disquiet as her characters wrestle with their unruly emotions, nasty thoughts and vengeful impulses.

Here, a jealous ‘sulky-shy student’ in love with her married professor viciously upends the equilibrium of his young daughter in the title story; in the gruelling Mister Stickum, students enact a hideous punishment on potential sex offenders, and a famously garrulous writer drafts his suicide note addressed to his wife (The Suicide).

Elsewhere, motherhood is menacing — from the nerveshredded, overly-protective parent in Baby Monitor, to the coolly disengaged mother who leaves her four-year-old out with the garbage in Take Me, I Am Free.