SHORT STORIES
NEIGHBORS AND OTHER STORIES by Diane Oliver (Faber £9.99, 272pp)
PIN-SHARP prose, keen observation and a deep emotional engagement with the struggles of black lives in the Jim Crow era of the american south are the mainstays of this remarkable collection, from an author who died when she was just 23.
here, Oliver explores the personal consequences for the trailblazers in the Civil rights movement, from the parents rethinking their decision to send their young son to a previously all-white school (neighbors), to college girl Winifred who’s ‘tired of being the experiment’, and whose mental health declines in The Closet On The Top Floor.
elsewhere, it’s the domestic drama that pulls us into Oliver’s orbit — from tricky stepmother/ stepdaughter dynamics and floundering marriages, to the effects of poverty on pupils and teachers, and especially on the women who leave their own children home alone to care for someone else’s.
FLOAT UP, SING DOWN by Laird Hunt (Riverrun £18.99, 224pp)
GENIAL and generous of heart, these 14 interlinked stories capture the lives and loves of the inhabitants of Bright Creek in indiana, where everyone knows everyone and secrets ripple under the surface of their rural world.
Brimming with easy- going charm, there’s real heart and hurt here, too, as hunt unspools the hopes and dreams of his beguiling characters.
There’s gladys, who walks through the shadowy cornfields and worries about her war damaged husband, as hank, the elderly retired sheriff on the look out for romance himself, offers relationship advice to martial arts-obsessed greg, who’s crushing on Bethie, who works with him in the galaxy Whirl kiosk.
There’s unhappy, outsider irma, much missed by Candy, whose charming, chipper tone opens the collection, as she hosts a gossipy gathering of her friends. an absolute delight.
THIS IS SALVAGED by Vauhini Vara (Grove Press £12.99, 208pp)
LOSS lingers in the pages of Vara’s funny yet sad short stories; it’s a world of dead siblings, failed careers and love gone astray, but there’s also a defiant sense of grabbing at life with both hands and characters who refuse to give in or up.
From the mother who explains how a ‘foundational lie’ became ‘cupolas, friezes, lintels of untruth’ in regard to her child’s parentage (What next), to the artist in the titular story who abandoned his ‘fragile and perishable’ art to create a Biblical ark with inflammable consequences, there’s the realisation that, although things may ‘have been unmoored from all sense of meaning’, there’s hope and something to salvage from the wreckage.