Shockingly good short stories: The Great Good Places by Margaret Drabble, Devotions by
The Great Good Places by Margaret Drabble (Canongate £18.99, 208pp)
Drabble’s musings on old age, the past and death make for an enlivening read.
In this thought-provoking miscellany of memoir, essays and short stories, she recalls the locations that she loved – the ‘numinous’ seaside at Filey in North Yorkshire, and Bryn, her maternal grandparents’ family home; ponders the capricious nature of memory, and offers an honest appraisal on the ethics of a writing life, as she considers the damaging ‘catalogues of my past crimes’.
The stories offer a fictional perspective with an ageing actress confronting the wrinkled reality of her appearance in The Three Photographers.
The joys of congenial company are celebrated in The Isles Of The Blessed, and A Day In The Life Of A Weeping Woman relishes a visit to Drabble’s beloved British Library.
Devotions by Lucy Caldwell (Faber £14.99, 208pp)
these understated but emotionally rich stories explore the rituals of everyday life, and the quiet search for meaning against the bustle of marriage, motherhood and divorce.
Throughout, there’s the sense that her restless characters are haunted – in the case of The Lady Of The House, there may be a ghost in the guest bedroom of a Scottish gatehouse.
But it’s the memory of difficult feelings that make for unsettling disturbances here, from a young widow’s sorrow in Hamlet, a love story, to the old disappointments of Devotions, set in the December dark of the solstice, and a mother’s melancholy awareness of ‘life’s depths of longing’ in the beautifully detailed Little Lands.
My Dear You is available now
My Dear You by Rachel Khong (Hutchinson Heinemann £16.99, 240pp)
There’s a playful seriousness in these stories from the author of Goodbye, Vitamin. Speculative in nature, but rooted in life’s real worries, Khong’s characters are ruefully aware that they’re bamboozled by a wayward world, as seen in The Freshening, where the American government subjects the people to an experimental drug treatment to disguise race and gender.
Elsewhere, a woman attempts to recall the name of her soulmate in the afterlife (My Dear You), while in D-Day, best friends Jade and Ruby worry about the fate of their friendship when God, frustrated with humanity’s inhumanity, transform people into animals.