'Utterly brilliant': the best short stories out now - Every One Still Here by Liadan Ni Chuinn, Oddbody by Rose Keating, Autocorrect: Stories by Etgar Keret
Inherited trauma, families, grief and the quiet sorrows of everyday life mark these melancholy, utterly brilliant short stories.
It's a remarkable debut, as Ni Chuinn heads into the heart of the characters' lives and sets about a delicate delineation of their most devastating emotions, delivered with tenderness and understanding in prose that is hypnotic and melodic.
Take Russia, where an adopted man, mired in unfathomable feelings about his estrangement from his sister, consults a psychic for answers; or the equally impactful We All Go, where a young man is dealing with the death of his father and the legacy of living in Northern Ireland.
Oddbody by Rose Keating (Canongate £14.99, 208pp)
Rose Keating's debut collection is wonderfully weird, a world where a character can declare, hatchet in hand: 'I could tell you about things that are slick and warm and red, things that are hidden, whispered and wet'.
It's very much a mantra for these tales that take ordinary experiences and swerve them into the unexpected. In Squirm, an overwhelmed daughter takes care of her needy dad – who's turned into worm and is living in a compost-filled bath.
In the title story the vagaries of a co-dependent relationship are unspooled in all their complexities – but one of the partners is a ghost. Keating successfully marries gorgeous prose to playfully grotesque scenarios.
Autocorrect: Stories by Etgar Keret Translated by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverstein (Granta £14.99, 208pp)
Renowned author Etgar Keret packs some big ideas into his very short stories.
Alien space ships, parallel worlds, rogue virtual reality, reincarnation and the afterlife all play their part in disrupting the lives of his down-to-earth characters who are attempting to deal with love, loss, faith and failure in Keret's somewhat surreal settings.
Occasionally the tales are too pat, a punchline a little obvious, but the best of these 33 stories are deft and inventive.
Keret's droll humour and deadpan delivery add a light touch to the darkest of situations, as seen in Cherry Garcia Memories With M&Ms On Top when a mother with dementia movingly declares to the son she doesn't quite recognise: 'I know that you love me and I love you. Isn't that enough?'
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