These fantastic stories are a tapestry of beauty and melancholy. If for too long a time, you haven’t stopped to linger in your own most inner thoughts you might well do on reading these elegant works.

In ‘Under the Dam’ there are some beautiful images of home and comfort and friendship against a strange backdrop of menace that appears and fades, but never quite leaves, as the story unfolds. The vast structure of a viaduct, and later, a dam, throws the fragility of the three main characters into sharp relief. The dam is constantly present in your thoughts, oppressive and sinister. There’s a baby in it who you fear for, and the ghosts of Shelley, Mary and Harriet are all twined about it.
In ‘The Loss’ you notice that the style of the writing, oddly detached, carries exactly the feeling of the main character, Mr. Silverman, who knows he has lost his soul, -: ‘Before a man struggles to retain his living soul he must first be persuaded that he needs one.’
As in a few of these stories, Mr. Silverman’s wife is remote: ‘... and she appraised him as she had done when he told her about the prostitutes and about the secretary ... thanked him, nodded, as though it were both very strange and very characteristic. And he watched her vanishing behind her eyes, to where she really belonged.’

Somewhere in all the stories there is an element of things magical. In ‘The Necessary Strength’ there is the sense that at any moment something extraordinary could happen; it is very plainly told, - sparse even, and then there are moments of utterly beautiful imagery. A woman is saved by a strange horse she fears. She runs from him and dislocates her hip as she has done before: ‘He trailed his fringe and sticky mane across her face, and raised his head in a long upward indication of how she might rise.....’
‘In Another Country’ is an overwhelmingly poignant story that contrasts all the carefree immediacy of young lovers with that of the lives of two main characters, an elderly man and his wife. And here, quite suddenly in the writing, - as if you’d just rounded a point in the landscape where a beautiful vista opens up before you - is sheer poetry: ‘A sunny light was on that place where sweet and salt meet and the salt takes all the river in, all the streams of all the hills all along the way and feels not a bit of difference but continues vast and flat and through and through undrinkable.’
Extraordinary writing.

Rebecca.