Category Archives: short stories

#BookReview ‘Each of us a Petal’ by Amanda Huggins @troutiemcfish #shortstories

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All of human life is reflected in the perceptive short stories by Amanda Huggins and the focus of her latest anthology, Each of us a Petal, is Japan. From city streets and bars to the silence of snow-covered mountains, Huggins’ love and knowledge of the country shine clearly. It is her love song for Japan, its people, its heritage, countryside and traditions. Amanda HugginsThe Japanese lens brings a new flavour to themes familiar from earlier anthologies, of love and loss, being adrift and on the outside or left behind, and notions of identity. The small details are beautifully described. Ume, who collects champagne and oranges to start her day with a mimosa. Suzume who catches a glimpse of graceful cranes through a train window, ‘their black-tipped wings lit by the sun.’ Huggins has sat in the late night bars watching salarymen down glass after glass of whisky, she has walked the mountain paths where bears may lurk in shadows. As well as winning the Saboteur Award for Best Novella twice, prizes for poetry and the 2018 Costa Short Story Award runner-up award, she is also an award-winning travel writer. In Each of Us a Petal, these disciplines and insight are drawn together.
One of my favourite stories, one I found myself thinking about days later, is the shortest. ‘Sparrow Footprints’ is only one page, a brief tale as delicate as a bird’s footprints in the snow but the emotional message between the words is heavy and oh so familiar to anyone who has loved.
‘The Knife Salesman from Kochi’ is a longer tale with a shock at the end. Mr Omote is the knife salesman from Kochi who stays at the inn owned by Yumi, inherited from her mother. Huggins explores a depth of grief that, once the surface signs have faded, lurks deeply hidden from even those closest.
‘Stolen’ is about the illicit freedom that comes with anonymity, questioning how well you know yourself and the one that you are closest to. Anna and Keizo meet friends in the woodlands in moonlight, it is kitsune festival time and families picnic, children play, many wear masks. Keizo’s friends all wear traditional fox masks which cover the whole of the face, Anna and Keizo are given masks too. When couples begin disappearing into the woods, hand in hand, Keizo says they are taking advantage of the privacy offered by the trees.
Huggins is a master of condensing emotion into a few pages, focusing on one element and exploring it with precision and beauty. I finished the book and immediately started leafing through the pages again, searching for favourites to re-read. The title of the anthology is a quote from Huggins’ essay ‘Each of Us a Petal,’ included in this book, and refers to cherry blossom.
CLICK HERE TO BUY THE BOOK AT THE AUTHOR’S WEBSITE

Read my reviews of other work by Amanda Huggins:-
Novellas
ALL OUR SQUANDERED BEAUTY
CROSSING THE LINES
THE BLUE OF YOU
Short stories
AN UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPE
BRIGHTLY COLOURED HORSES
SCRATCHED ENAMEL HEART
SEPARATED FROM THE SEA
Poetry
THE COLLECTIVE NOUNS FOR BIRDS

If you like this, try:-
‘A Town Called Solace’ by Mary Lawson
‘Himself’ by Jess Kidd
‘Anderby Wold’ by Winfred Holtby

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:-
#BookReview EACH OF US A PETAL by Amanda Huggins @troutiemcfish https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-7h2 via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Verity Bright

#BookReview ‘Staying Afloat’ by @SueWilsea #shortstories

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Staying Afloat, the first anthology of short stories by Hull-based writer Sue Wilsea, has as its sub-text her experience teaching English in schools, colleges, prisons, libraries and community centres and this breathes life into her stories. She writes about lost children, bereaved children, struggling parents and struggling teachers with sincerity and a touch of humour. Sue WilseaI’ve chosen three of the 19 stories in Staying Afloat. You can read more of Wilsea’s stories in her second anthology, Raw Materials.
‘Shapes. Colours’ is the story of Stephen who loves his teacher Miss Anderson dearly but avoids her gaze every morning when she points to the thermometer chart and asks how everyone is feeling today. Stephen has a Worry that started “as just a tiny spider of anxiety, scuttling around in his head at night when he couldn’t sleep.” To avoid attention in class, Stephen usually chooses yellow or orange rather than a dark colour.
In ‘Two Ophelias and Me’, first published in QWF magazine, an unnamed narrator thinks of two friends, Lin and Lyndsey, who jumped off the Humber Bridge. “I like to think of their hair and clothes streaming out like twin Ophelias (the three of us went to see Hamlet once. I thought I wouldn’t understand a word and actually I didn’t, but it was brilliant all the same) as they drift down deep, deep onto the riverbed.”
‘Lost’ is a heart breaking story about loss and memory. It starts “I’d lost my mother and was therefore in somewhat of a tizz.” When her mother is not in her room at her care home or wandering around the garden, Alice takes to the streets to check her mother’s haunts. It is a short, poignant story with an unexpected ending.
The settings for Wilsea’s tales are primarily the North of England and East Yorkshire, her characters including a vicar who discovers his true vocation in his forties; and a schoolteacher whose mischievous and disruptive pupil uncannily echoes her own son. ‘Paper Flowers’ won a BBC radio competition and was read on air by Judi Dench.

If you like this, try these:-
‘The Story’ ed. Victoria Hislop
‘Scratched Enamel Heart’ by Amanda Huggins
‘Last Stories’ by William Trevor

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview STAYING AFLOAT by @SueWilsea #shortstories https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3gu via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Separated from the Sea’ by Amanda Huggins @troutiemcfish #shortstories

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About love, loss, partings and freedom. About yearning for a connection with another person but sometimes recognising it is better to walk away. Separated from the Sea by Amanda Huggins is a collection of poignant stories that cannot fail to touch you. Some of the stories spoke to me personally because of the Yorkshire settings, but locations range from Japan to America and Europe. Huggins has mastered the form; just enough detail, just enough emotion to pull you in and a well-disguised twist at the end. Amanda HugginsI have chosen three stories to focus on. In ‘Whatever Speed She Dared’ a woman drives on an empty motorway across the Pennines in the dark of night. She is tempted by what lies ahead, a new future. But an encounter with a skittish rabbit gives her pause for thought.
In ‘Sea Glass’ two children walk on the beach. Alife tells Cathy that pieces of blue sea glass are the souls of fishermen lost at sea. Another two pieces, he says, are the eyes of ships’ cats swept overboard. ‘If you match a pair of eyes, and sleep with them under your pillow, then the cat’ll find his way back to land.’ A melancholic longing for love and belonging that cuts to the heart.
In ‘Already Formed’, a woman watches a boy arrive at the holiday cottage next door and his presence prompts memories of her son Rory. A child that never was but still exists in the core of the heart, more true than a true love that was a mirage. A sad story, totally believable.
Huggins is a highly accomplished writer who uses language both beautiful and at the same time sparing, there are no indulgent passages of prose to detract from the main message. Every word is weighed before inclusion. A delight.

Read my reviews of other work by Amanda Huggins, including another novella, collections of short stories & poetry:-
ALL OUR SQUANDERED BEAUTY
AN UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPE
BRIGHTLY COLOURED HORSES
EACH OF US A PETAL
CROSSING THE LINES
SCRATCHED ENAMEL HEART
THE BLUE OF YOU
THE COLLECTIVE NOUN FOR BIRDS

If you like this, try:-
‘Normal Rules Don’t Apply’ by Kate Atkinson
‘Staying Afloat’ by Sue Wilsea
‘Last Stories’ by William Trevor

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview SEPARATED FROM THE SEA by Amanda Huggins @troutiemcfish https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3qn via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘All the Rage’ by AL Kennedy #shortstories

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What a treat is All the Rage. Twelve stories about love by the inimitable AL Kennedy. Love:  looking for it, losing it, exploring what love is. Instead of describing the stories, I want to celebrate her writing. The way she tells us so much in just one or two sentences. AL Kennedy‘Late in Life’ features  an older couple waiting. They are waiting in a queue at the building society, waiting for him to pay off her mortgage, in a coming-together of two lives. She provocatively eats a fig, being sexy for him “to pass the time.” Despite his hatred of public show, he watches her, “he is now-and-then watching.” He gives her “the quiet rise of what would be a smile if he allowed it. She knows this because she knows him and his habits and the way the colour in his eyes can deepen when he’s glad, can be nearly purple with feeling glad when nothing else about him shows a heat of any kind.”
In ‘The Practice of Mercy’, Dorothy is lost, alone and approaching old age and contemplating her relationship. “She realised once more, kept realising, as if the information wouldn’t stick, realised again how likely it was that someone you’d given the opening of leaving, someone you’d said was free to go, that someone might not discover a way to come back.”
‘All the Rage’ is set on a train platform. A couple are delayed, travelling home from Wales, stuck waiting for a train that never comes. Kennedy tells us everything about their relationship by describing their suitcase. “Inside it, their belongings didn’t mix – his shirts and underpants in a tangle, Pauline’s laundry compressed into subsidiary containments. They had separate sponge bags too. Got to keep those toothbrushes apart.”
Simon, the narrator of ‘Run Catch Run’, considers his unnamed dog, he is at once a child teaching his puppy and also an adult with a mature awareness of inevitability. “His dad had suggested she could be called Pat, which was a joke: Pat the dog. Simon didn’t want to make his dog a joke.”
She shows us so much, in so few sentences.

And click the title to read my reviews of these other AL Kennedy books:-
DAY
SERIOUS SWEET

If you like this, try:-
‘The Story’ ed. Victoria Hislop
‘An Unfamiliar Landscape’ by Amanda Huggins
‘Last Stories’ by William Trevor

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview ALL THE RAGE by AL Kennedy http://wp.me/p5gEM4-NL via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Story’ by Victoria Hislop @VicHislop #shortstories

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I read The Story: Love, Loss & the Lives of Women, edited by novelist Victoria Hislop, on my Kindle, without really appreciating just how much reading was involved for 100 stories. It’s not like holding a hefty book. But I enjoyed every single one of them. Some of the authors were well-known, others were new to me. Some made me laugh out loud (I’m thinking of Dorothy Parker here), others stopped my breath with sadness. I discovered authors I want to explore further: one of the reasons I have always loved short stories.Victoria HislopThe short story form is fascinating. As a reader I am very demanding, like anthology editor Victoria Hislop I want to be instantly grabbed by a story. “Readers are allowed to be impatient with short stories,” she writes. “My own patience limit for a novel which I am not hugely enjoying may be three or four chapters. If it has not engaged me by then, it has lost me and is returned to the library or taken to a charity shop. With a short story, three or four pages are the maximum I allow (sometimes they are only five or six pages long in any case). A short story can entice us in without preamble or background information, and for that reason it had no excuse. It must not bore us even for a second.”
So, my favourite stories? Hislop has divided her selection into three sections so I have chosen three from each.

LOVE:
Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Atlantic Crossing’ – the gentle story of love and longing at a distance. My favourite story of all, I think.

Dorothy Parker’s ‘A Telephone Call’ – the stream of consciousness dialogue of waiting for a telephone call is an everywoman story.

‘The Artist’ by Maggie Gee is about Emma, an unfulfilled wife who employs an East European, Boris, as an odd-job man/builder. He says he is an artist, she doesn’t believe him.

LOSS:
‘The First Year of My Life’ by Muriel Spark. It starts, “I was born on the first day of the second month of the last year of the First World War, a Friday.” An account of war seen through the innocent but at the same time all-knowing eyes of an infant.

‘The Pill Box‘ by Penelope Lively is about the flexibility of imagination. A male teacher and writer is haunted by the past, remembering, wondering how the world would be now if things had happened differently when he was young.

‘The Merry Widow’ by Margaret Drabble tells the story of Elsa Palmer who, after the death of her husband Philip, goes on the summer holiday they had planned together. Grief overcomes her, but in an unconventional way.

THE LIVES OF WOMEN:
‘G-String’ by Nicola Barker is about the triumph of the modern knicker. This made me laugh out loud.

‘Betty’ is the woman who captivates the teenage narrator of Margaret Atwood’s tale. “From time to time I would like to have Betty back, if only for an hour’s conversation.”

‘A Society’ by Virginia Woolf, about a group of young women on the verge of the Great War who make themselves into a “society for asking questions. One of us was to visit a man-of-war; another was to hide herself in a scholar’s study; another was to attend a meeting of business men; while all wee to read books, look at pictures, go to concerts, keep our eyes open on the streets, and ask questions perpetually.”

Read my reviews of other these books by Victoria Hislop:-
THE FIGURINE
THE SUNRISE
THOSE WHO ARE LOVED

If you like this, try:-
‘The Duchess’ by Wendy Holden
‘Anderby Wold’ by Winifred Holtby
‘All the Rage’ by AL Kennedy

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE STORY by Victoria Hislop @VicHislop http://wp.me/p5gEM4-N5 via @SandraDanby