Normal Rules Don't Apply
Stories
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3.9 • 28 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that readers love about her novels—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.
Nothing is quite as it seems in this collection of eleven dazzling stories. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man who bets on a horse that may—or may not—have spoken to him. Everything that readers love about the novels of Kate Atkinson is here—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.
A startling and funny feast for the imagination, these stories conjure a multiverse of subtly connected worlds while illuminating the webs of chance and connection among us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This stunning collection from Atkinson (Shrines of Gaiety) is a master class in literary worldbuilding. These 11 interconnected stories happen in a world one step removed from this one, where human existence is regulated by the Void, a daily, five-minute apocalyptic event causing mass death. Here, characters proper to fairy tales, myths, and scripture rub shoulders with inhabitants of northern England in scenes from otherwise prosaic lives: recurring character Franklin, for example, who, over the course of the collection, meets a talking horse and a chatty dog, and finally drives off with Aoife, the bewitched child of a queen. In "Gene-Sis," humankind is subject to the decisions of Kitty, an advertising executive and Sister of God, who must remake the world from scratch while simultaneously writing a campaign for a new, healthy smoothie. "Blithe Spirit" follows Mandy, a downtrodden secretary to a disreputable politician, who observes the investigation into her own murder from the ghostly beyond. Atkinson delights in metafictional possibilities: young Franklin's idea for a novel—"A text based on non-linear dynamics, a Borgesian exploration of parallel worlds"—though ridiculed by other characters, mimics the collection's structure. If the concept sounds promisingly fun, the whimsical but sharp prose is built to match, full of speculative glee, but tinged with poignancy.
