Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love by Huma Qureshi

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It:

Huma Qureshi’s Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love is a collection of stories about the fractures that run through relationships. Between mothers and daughters. Husbands and wives. Friends and mis-matched lovers.

There is the supressed memory of a sexual assault, buried so deep it has never seemed important enough to tell the man she loves. We meet a daughter who, heartbroken at the death of her father, attempts to poison her mother. Another who pushes her mother from the balcony of a hotel bedroom. A mixed-race engaged couple break apart over a failure to see each other’s point of view. A wife in an arranged marriage slides into post-partum depression with a husband with whom she cannot connect. Another folds paper cranes as she recovers from her third miscarriage.

Listing the themes makes this collection sound dark, even grim. Yet something about it nonetheless feels like soul-food. Life-affirming.

Qureshi’s language is often lyrical, conjuring beauty even when her mood is dark. “In the afternoons, lazy white clouds rolled through the sky like long cats, casting a thin shade between dissolving to let the sun stretch into the evenings again.” In another story, loose stars roll like spare change across the city sky. There is a recurring image of floating paper – not just the origami cranes, but butterflies floating like bits of ripped paper in the breeze, petals of bougainvillea scattering like paper hearts falling in slow motion.

Longlisted for the 2022 Jhalak Prize, this is a collection of stories that would bear reading and re-reading.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Subjunctive Moods by C G Menon; Love Across A Broken Map by The Whole Kahani

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories about the things that break relationships

Perfect Accompaniment: Folding an origami paper crane

Genre: Short stories. Literary

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Keeping It Under Wraps, edited by Louise Bryant, Alnaaze Nathoo and Tracy Hope

Reviewer: JJ Marsh

What we thought of it: 

I'll read a couple, I told myself, and come back later. 

No. That's not possible. 

These stories are not something you can browse. 

This is pared-down, stripped-back, naked and honest. Don’t look away. 

What happens after ‘fade to black’ is left to the viewer/reader’s imagination and imaginations tend to airbrush experience. Ecstasy, agony, shame, confusion, boredom and laughter are part of intimacy. Sex is all those things and exquisitely personal. 

Keeping It Under Wraps is every conversation we should have had as kids, as teenagers, as middle-aged searchers for the G-spot. Broken hearts and pain, sex toys and laughter, pornography and puzzlement, sex and self-respect, it’s all here. 

I loved the whispered, shouted and clearly stated personal sex lives in this collection. Sex can be joyous or brutal. One of the ways we reframe our experiences is by listening to others. This book opens a door. 

You’ll enjoy this if you liked: True stories about intimacy, in-depth discussions with the likes of Mariella Frostrup or Pamela Stephenson 

Avoid if you don’t like: Frank discussions about preferences and unpleasant truths 

Ideal accompaniments: A warm bath, some time alone and a little notebook to record your own feelings. 

Genre: Non-fiction, anthology, short stories

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Who’s Loving You? (editor: Sareeta Domingo)

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It:

In her introduction to this collection of short stories she has curated, Sareeta Domingo remembers how: “Between the pages of my beloved books, it soon became apparent that neither tales of romantic woe, nor the sexy bonkbusters I’d eye curiously on the shelves {…}, nor even those sophisticated, classically revered literary tales of love and honour, featured any people who looked like me.” Did that mean, she asked herself, that love and desire were not for young people of colour like her?

In response to that, and because she loves the romance genre, Domingo curated this anthology “to create space for British women of colour to write about romantic love in all its many guises.”

If Bolu Babalola’s short story collection, Love in Colour, reached back into folklore for its inspiration, these stories are contemporary – or in some cases futuristic. In Varaizo’s ‘Long Distance’, a love affair with a heart-breaking twist blossoms over a near-future vision of social media. ‘No one is Lonely’ by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan takes place in a London that has been engulfed with floods, “where wilting bunches of flours are tied to posts where the drowned were lost.”

There are gay characters and straight, cis and trans. Sara Collins ‘Brief Encounters’ brings the classic tale to present day London with new energy, while in Daniellé Dash’s ‘The Row’, a woman fleeing a relationship gone wrong finds solace in the tender touch of a hairdresser’s fingers. Dorothy Koomson’s ‘My Heart Beats’, features a couple whose relationship seems to be a sequence of missed opportunities – can they finally connect?

Domingo’s own ‘The Waves Will Carry Us Back’ features a refugee rescued from the sea by a surfer, while Kuchenga’s ‘Rain … Doubtful’ gives us a transwoman finding unqualified love and acceptance.

The stories travel the world too. Returning to Iran for a mother’s funeral results in a meeting of hearts and minds in a wholly unexpected location in Sara Jafari’s ‘Motherland’. In Kelechi Okafor’s ‘The Watchers’, a kind of guardian angel drawn from Nigerian cosmology watches over a pair of souls who meet time after time as they are reincarnated into different lives. In Amna Saleem’s ‘Rani’, a grandmother’s tale of love during Partition interweaves with her granddaughter’s.

These are tales with an edge to them. The women in them are empowered – they choose love, or reject it, on their own terms. There are stories that are tender, erotic, funny and tragic. They are rich with sentences that distil and capture emotion, whether it is Sara Collins on being assailed by grief:

“There is nowhere in the train station where she can scream or pound her knees or keel over, nowhere to make cow-like noises, why don’t they build somewhere like that – like public toilets, but for grief?”

Or Amna Saleem on a child carrying the weight of family expectations:

“Conspicuously linking me to a rich ancestral tapestry where growing up, I half expected to discover I was a latent vampire slayer waiting to become the brown Buffy Summers of Scotland”

There is something, surely, to appeal to everyone. Certainly a heartfelt demonstration that, as Domingo says: “Love is inside us – all of us.”

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Love In Colour by Bolu Babalola, The Nearness of You by Sareeta Domingo

Avoid If you Dislike:  Love in all its shapes and sizes

Perfect Accompaniment: A chilled glass of your favourite bubbly

Genre: Romance, Short Stories

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How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought Of It:

Winner of the 2020 Giller Prize, Canada’s prestigious nations book award, How to Pronounce Knife is a collection of short stories that capture the immigrant experience.

Rooted in the Lao refugee community in Canada, the stories it tells are nonetheless universal. They reveal the day to day racism, sexism and classism immigrants face and their uphill battle against the workings of power and privilege.

In the titular story, a young girl rejects the transparent illogic of the first letter in a word being silent and chooses instead to defend her father’s phonetic pronunciation of knife.

In 'Chick-a-Chee' a family finds a way to create their own holiday tradition from a baffling ritual of the new country.

In 'Picking Worms', a farm labourer finds a young white boy she helped into a job promoted over her head to become the boss.

We find grinding poverty and the impossibility of getting the ingredients to make the food of home. We meet the factory workers who save up for risky plastic surgery to make their noses will look more like those of the white girls who get to work in offices, the ex-boxer turned manicurist who learns that a relationship with a client can never extend beyond the door of the shop, and the mother who watches from afar because her daughter is too embarrassed to acknowledge her.

Like many refugees around the world, many of the families here have given up good jobs and traded status for safety in a new country.

“Back in Laos, the men who worked in this field have been doctors, teachers, framers with their own land, like my mom. None had set out for a life spent crouching down the soft earth, groping for faceless things in the night.”

These are stories steeped in sadness, but they are also wryly funny and highlight the incredible resilience of immigrant communities everywhere.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Good Immigrant (ed Nikesh Shukla); A Country of Refuge (ed Lucy Popescu)

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories of grinding poverty

Perfect Accompaniment: Sticky rice and papaya salad with dried shrimps

Genre: Short Stories



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Love in Colour by Bolu Babalola

 

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought Of It:

What a joy this book was to read!

Bolu Babalola has taken raw material from folk tales and mythology around the world and spun from it a paeon to romantic love, in all its manifestations.

The mundane mystique of romantic love that is ubiquitous at a glance, but, when you look closer, you notice the tessellations of understanding, patience, friendship and attractions. She sees both the miracle of the spark lighting and also the working, because it takes work, and for the work to work, you have to respect each other, like each other.

In this collection of tales, figures familiar to those with a classic western education (Psyche, Scheherzade, Nefertiti, Thisbe) recount their stories alongside a pantheon of characters from Nigeria, Ghana, Lesotho, China, Korea.

Some have been transported into the modern world – others remain in a version of their original setting. Thus Osun, a Nigerian river deity, becomes a sports star at an elite school. Psyche works in the cut-throat world of the fashion magazine. Nefertiti operates in the criminal underworld of a contemporary-feeling dystopia

As Babalola says in her Author’s Note, many of the original tales were “rife with misogyny and violence and were created within heavily patriarchal contexts.” She has transformed them, placing the women at the centre of their stories; giving them agency, power, discernment.

Here are childhood sweethearts and first date flirtations. Partnerships built up over many years and alliances forged in a red-hot minute. Some of the stories and sexy and others tender, some crackle with wit and some are heartbreaking.

Bablola’s dialogue is wonderful. I would love to see these done as a series of television shorts (directed by Michaela Coel perhaps?). They would surely fizz out of the screen as they fizz off the page.

The last few stories are not grounded in mythology but are Babalola originals, and the last of all, reading between the lines, is a tribute to the author’s parents. If so, no wonder they raised a daughter with such sensitivity to this most transformative of emotions.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Love Across a Broken Map by The Whole Kahani, The Nearness of You by Sareeta Domingo

Avoid This If You Dislike: Happy endings; Celebrating love without a shred of cynicism

Perfect Accompaniment: A glass of rosé

Genre: Romance, Mythology, Short Stories, Contemporary

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Nudibranch by Irenosen Okojie

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

As Irenosen Okojie explains in the opening to the titular story in this, her second short story collection, a nudibranch is “a soft-bodied, marine Gastropod mollusc, which shed their shells after their larval stage ... known for their often extraordinary colours and striking forms.” It’s a fair enough description of these often mind-bending stories that explore humans at their most vulnerable.

Okojie has said that she was inspired by Nigerian oral story telling tradition – by memories of her grandmother telling stories that were often surreal, always with a moral. The stories may be rooted in that tradition but they are both modern and global. Her settings range from London to Martinique, Llanberis to Mozambique, via Berlin, Japan and Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

The subjects are equally varied. A paintballing weekend becomes the scene of a revenge tragedy. A homeless Japanese man searches for his lost lover. A hip-hop artist recovering from a nervous breakdown finds temporary solace with a trans woman called Dee-light ...

Yet such one-line descriptions fail to give any true sense of these stories, which spool out each time in unexpected directions – surreal often violent, full of images of flesh being devoured, of body parts functioning autonomously.

These are not stories that give up their meaning easily. You have to work at them, and even then the author’s intent may elude you. In that way, the experience is closer to walking through a gallery of expressionist paintings, where the symbolism remains always just beyond your grasp.

Longlisted for the 2020 Jhalak Prize.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Speak Gigantular by Irenosen Okojie, The Beautiful Side of the Moon by Leye Adenle

Avoid If You Dislike: Surrealism and violence

Perfect Accompaniment: Pressed tongue

Genre: Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Surrealism

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Roma Nova Extra by Alison Morton

Review by JJ Marsh


What we thought:

This is the perfect companion volume to The Roma Nova series. But even if you'd not read one of these alternative history books, you'd enjoy this as a standalone.

A selection of short stories which go off at a tangent from the novels, or fill in some of the gaps. Each has its own identity, characters and narrative arc, while nestling comfortably under the overarching premise of a Roman empire that never died, but run by men and women as equals.


The stories are divided into two sections - Glimpses from the Past, and Modern Times. The author's grasp on historical and imagined detail from AD 370 to the present and into the future of 2029 are convincingly grounded, allowing the reader a privileged insight into another world.


I was expecting intrigue, powerful women, action and excitement as an avid reader of the Roma Nova series, but the romantic element took me by surprise. Here is love: for one's family, country, potential partner and even a statue. It is touching and moves you when you least expect it.


One of the elements I enjoyed most was the connections between each tale. The reader recognises physical and personality traits through the generations, relishing how the protagonist of one tale becomes an influential ancestor in another. It is like being privy to a dynasty that never existed.
But you really wish it had.


You’ll enjoy this if you liked: The Roma Nova Series, The Power by Naomi Alderman, or Code Name Lise by Larry Loftis

Avoid if you don’t like: Alternative history, wide-ranging timelines, strong women

Ideal accompaniments: Mead (powerful yet sweet), cheese, grapes and a crisp apple with Nabucco playing in the background.

Available on Amazon

Life After Men (A Silver Sex Kittens Short Story #1) by Jean Gill and Karen Charlton

Reviewer: Liza Perrat, author of the French Historical, The Bone Angel trilogy (Spirit of Lost Angels, Wolfsangel, Blood Rose Angel) and new Australian 1970s series: The Silent Kookaburra and The Swooping Magpie.

What we thought: What a heart-warming and entertaining short story! Well, long short story really.

Being of a similar age, mid-50s, I could readily identify with the two main characters: Carys and Moira, just enjoying life and attempting to do the things they were always afraid of doing, or never got the opportunity, earlier in life.

We are introduced to other “Sex Kittens” in this story –– single, divorced or widowed women –– creating a humorous, warm-hearted and supportive circle of friends for future stories.

This story might not be long, but already we can see the characters changing, accepting their new life circumstances, and trying to make the best of them –– something with which many women of this age are faced. A situation that can be challenging, when one’s bloom of youth has faded, and when you lack the heart or stamina to “begin again”.

However, this story, the first of many in this series I believe, gives us hope that starting over is, in fact, possible. And maybe even enjoyable.

Funny, witty, laugh-out-loud, I would highly recommend Life After Men and I can’t wait for the next “Sex Kittens” story.

Avoid if you don’t like: Coming of Age stories featuring older women.

Ideal accompaniments: A glass of chilled white wine and some 80s music.

Genre: chick lit, humorous, short story

Available on Amazon

Subjunctive Moods by C G Menon

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

I first read ‘Watermelon Seeds’ by C G Menon in the anthology Love Across a Broken Map by The Whole Kahani collective, also published by Dahlia Books. It was one of my favourite stories in the book, so I had high hopes for Subjunctive Moods, Menon’s own collection, and it did not disappoint.

The definition of a subjunctive mood is ‘a grammatical construction with expresses a condition which is doubtful or not factual.’ A common thread running through this collection is imagining lives as they could have been, if things had turned out just a little differently, or sometimes as they might still turn out to be. For one hour each year, as the clocks go back, one woman constructs an imaginary affair with a man she broke up with at university. Another dabbles with an actual affair, whilst in yet another returns to a secret place from her childhood to lay to rest her longing for a life where her son did not die.

The collection moves back and forth between Malaysia and Britain (with a single foray into Australia thrown in for good measure). The British stories take place in the hard, rocky corners of these islands – on the slag heaps of South Wales, the moorlands around Middlesborough, the coast by the Farne Islands.

Menon has a gift for finding fresh and arresting turns of phrase. The wife of a man with a wandering eye watches a beautiful woman as “her reflection swims up into his empty hands.” A troubled young mother who has already had one child taken from her contemplates, “a lifetime of trudging up her terraced street with a pram and a hangover and her mistakes dragging behind her like a sodden length of rope.”

Even before I found the first story set in Wales, Menon’s language was reminding me of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Her description of a faithless husband sloping off back to his mistress, “to be checked off her lists and hung up in her kitchen with the dinner menus, where he will dangle uselessly for several years,” is irresistibly reminiscent of Mr and Mrs Ogmore Pritchard.

Menon weaves threads of old beliefs – Malayan, Welsh, Hindu – into some of the stories to give a hint of magic realism. By coincidence, I had just finished reading Sharlene Teo’s Ponti, which introduced me to pontianaks – the malign, vampire-like female ghosts of Malaysia – before finding them again here, in two of Menon’s stories. But here too is the makara, the Hindu sea monster, and the piece of iron that keeps Welsh goblins at bay so your baby can’t be stolen away.

An utterly beguiling collection of stories by an author who weaves spells with language around the lives of ordinary people.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Love Across a Broken Map by The Whole Kahani, Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, Speak Gigantular by Irenosen Okojie 

Avoid If You Dislike: Spinning poetry out of ordinary lives.

Perfect Accompaniment: Each story has a flavour of its own – from Bara Brith to Nasi Lemak

Genre: Short Stories, Literary Fiction

Temptation: A User’s Guide by Vesna Main

Reviewer: Barbara Scott Emmett, author of Delirium: The Rimbaud Delusion, The Land Beyond Goodbye and The Man with the Horn (http://barbarascottemmett.blogspot.co.uk/)

What We Thought: Vesna Main's short stories are unlike anything I have read before. I was occasionally reminded of Beckett and Pinter - though for me these stories lacked the dramatic tension of the plays. They vary in length from a page or two to interminable. Well, those long ones do actually end eventually but often without a conclusion.

These stories are irritating, bewildering, annoying, bemusing, challenging and enraging. The thing is, that appears to be the intention. They prod you and poke you and generally disturb you until you want to fling them aside in a fit of pique.

I made the mistake of reading some of these before bed - something I would strongly advise against as I was kept awake trying to puzzle out what they were about and what they might mean. Or, if they weren't about anything, what the fact that they weren't about anything might mean. I had to stop reading a couple of the more repetitive ones for the sake of my sanity.

Many of the stories feature people who are obsessed with something, though often that something is not obvious. Some seem obsessed with overthinking and others with having no particular thoughts at all. The characters are not particularly rounded and often there is little or no description or dialogue. Indeed, these pieces conform to no conventions of short fiction at all. Now, this is not to say they are bad. Or badly written. If the intention is to frustrate the reader and provoke a reaction, they are very good indeed.

Now, I expect some people will think these are rubbish and that the publishers are suffering from Emperor's New Clothes syndrome. Being the sophisticated consumer of modern fiction that I am, however, (or that I imagine myself to be) I am determined to avoid falling into this trap. I can't honestly say I enjoyed them and they certainly weren't relaxing - but then neither is Picasso's Guernica.

Anyway, you will have to read them yourself in order to decide whether they are good or not. Go on - give them a go. I dare you.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: Unconventional fiction that challenges and provokes not because of its subject matter but because of the way it is written.

Avoid if you dislike: Being rubbed up the wrong way by a writer you've never met.

Ideal accompaniments: A couple of paracetamol.

Genre: Short Fiction.

Available on Amazon

French Collection by Vanessa Couchman

Reviewer: Liza Perrat, author of The Bone Angel trilogy (Spirit of Lost Angels, Wolfsangel, Blood Rose Angel) and latest release, The Silent Kookaburra.

What we thought: For Francophiles, French Collection: Twelve Short Stories is an anthology of short stories from Vanessa Couchman, author of The House at Zaronza, which I immensely enjoyed and reviewed here.

This eclectic collection of twelve short stories is inspired by the history and culture of the author’s adopted country, France. The descriptions, emotions and savoir-faire portray her love for the history, people and traditions of France, and the characters are so well-drawn that the reader comes to know and care about them in a matter of a few short pages.

Not all, but most of the stories are historical, and, as an author of French-based historical fiction novels, I admired and enjoyed all of them. My personal favourite was the 17th century plague story, The Visitation, but there’s something for everyone in this mix: historical, contemporary, romance, art, ghosts, all of them entertaining vignettes of French life across the ages.

Included at the end of the collection is Chapter 1 of the author’s next novel, The Corsican Widow, which whet my appetite. After Vanessa Couchman's most entertaining debut novel, The House at Zaronza, I'm really looking forward to reading this new one!

You’ll like this if you enjoy: literary historical and contemporary fiction; a touch of the supernatural.

Avoid if you don’t like: historical and modern-day short stories.

Ideal accompaniments: French baguette and camembert, washed down with a glass of sturdy red Bordeaux.

Genre: Short stories. Literary fiction. Historical fiction.

Available on Amazon