Books & Poetry

This collection of short stories is Caroline Oulton’s first work of fiction and follows her non-fiction debut, ‘Dumped!: A Single Mother Shoots from the Hip’, in which she chronicled her misery and rage after her children’s father walked out on the family. ‘Unsafe Attachments’ sticks to her established territory of adulterous betrayal, this time scrutinising it from several perspectives via a group of loosely connected London professionals, largely clichéd media types. The most prolific character, Dinah, whom we meet briefly in subsequent stories after her domination of the first, seems to be Oulton herself: a harried TV executive whose husband leaves her a lone parent to two toddlers.

But although the focus appears to be on successful middle-aged women united in their concerns over children, partners, careers and wobbly upper-arms, not all of them are the victims of the piece. Abi, a senior civil servant with a sexually active teenage daughter, is unsure whether her new child will be related to her husband or not; Lucy’s flirtation with a magnetic actor starring in the TV drama she is producing threatens her young family’s collective survival; and Liz proves her flighty, self-centred girlfriend wrong by gaining from her disloyalty. There are also a couple of unsettling anomalies – such as Carey, the disillusioned paedophile – through which Oulton fleetingly departs from her harassed-yet-sympathetic alpha female comfort zone.

The stories themselves are interwoven skilfully and each provides a satisfying probe into the characters’ illicit lives, which engage you wholly, in the same guilty way as a celebrity gossip magazine. Oulton’s prose is effective, nakedly frank and, at intervals, truly delightful. So it’s a shame that several of the tales, notably those covering longer time-periods, feel a little rushed and over-told. That is, we are given a long paragraph summary of what happens in the months between one scene and the next, without experiencing it alongside the character.

Despite this, the action we do witness is deftly unravelled, and more than enough to make the whole book a firmly enjoyable read.