Reviewing issue 5 of this always impressive publication in 2008, I felt that Ali Smith and Toby Litt outshone the other contributors - but this year, although the anthology includes contributions from well-known writers - Bernadine Evaristo, Salena Godden, Nicholas Hogg, the late David Foster Wallace - I think the balance has shifted in favour of unknown names and up-and-coming ones.

Comic writing is often disparaged in favour of seriousness and sorrow - although competition judges have recently pleaded for more humour - and it may be that comedy works best when mixed with sadness and tragedy, or at least layered over not-funny subject matter. Barbara Bleiman's Happy Ever After is a charming and funny story about Bella, a Jewish peasant girl who gets shipped back and forth between Lithuania and Cape Town at the whim of her future in-laws - but it incorporates stark truths about the characters' lives and references to yet-to-come horrors that give it richness and depth. While Bella herself, quiet, strong in courage and unquenchable, gets the happy ending she deserves.

"Yes," said Bella. "You're right," she said but her voice was sad. "He was so fine," she said. "Such a smile." She wiped away a tear and then, "But that's all done now and we won't ever mention it again."

Bleiman's is perhaps my favourite story in a collection of the good-to-excellent, the varied and unpredictable, the fun and thought-provoking. "Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas," said Theodore Sturgeon, in a quote that gets a page to itself. But you can certainly write fiction that contains ideas, or is itself a new idea. For instance, George Lewkowicz's Illumination, a computer game gone mad of a story. I also love the techno-poetic language in Daniel Bourke's Seaweed and this story's laid-back, cynical narrator.

Other fine stories bear out Sturgeon's principle, being simply (or not so simply) about people and human relationships. Emmanuella Dekonor's subtle and powerfully written The Small House on Phuduhudu Road, for example, or Holland, Tamara Pollock's bleakly funny and edge-of-desperate story about a single mother's search for love -

"I'm sorry," she whispered. But perhaps he wouldn't hear her. And then, because he was going, and she had nothing to lose, "Is she blonde?"

Animals also feature here and tend to meet violent ends. Dogs are made to eat broken glass, cats are flayed, fox cubs shot and dragged from under floorboards. Why so much pain, I wonder? Because the suffering of animals wrings our hearts? These stories - of children whose pets' deaths leave them terrified or heartbroken, or adults sabotaged by compassion - are skilfully told, but hard to read without putting the book aside from time to time. And that's a pity.

OOh thanks for this. Bumping it up!!!

Oooh! My first review and it's a good one, I think...even though my story was one of the sad ones.

Interestingly one of the editors said to me she thought it was quite a dark collection- no idea why - maybe sign of the times?

Thank you so much for this Elbowsnitch, and am going to forward a link to Barbara who I'm sure will be thrilled.

All the best.