Books & Poetry

Adam Thorpe’s new collection of short stories, is assured. It’s also insightful and shrewd about the minutiae of people’s everyday inner lives. These tales are full of lonely people who are slightly bewildered by life and struggling to understand things.

Opener ‘Heavy Shopping’ tells of a man alienated from his job and his wife but welcoming the birth of his daughter; the closing ‘Is This The Way You Said?’ deals with the drowning of a young child. Both are poised and thoughtful considerations of paternal emotion. The stories demonstrate an impressive formal and stylistic variety, moving with ease between different settings, time-frames and points of view.

There is a slight writerly self-consciousness at work: ‘Bright Green Trainers’ has a post-graduate working on an obscure poet; the central character of ‘Karaoke’ becomes obsessed with a poet whose work he finds by chance in a pub. These two stories attempt to capture the ethereal or cerebral essence of reading and writing, and they derive their poignant flavour from acknowledging that this is impossible.

In fact, add in the tragic publisher in the title story, various musicians and a man who attempts to walk routes described in books from the early twentieth century (regularly being arrested on the way) and the collection’s keynote might be that art is no consolation for modern life.