Yellow Cake
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Yellow Cake brings together another ten short stories from this extraordinarily talented writer - each of them fiercely original and quietly heartbreaking.
Ranging from fantasy and fairy tale to horror and stark reality, what pervades these stories is the sense of humanity. The people of Lanagan's worlds face trials, temptations and degradations. They swoon and suffer and even kill for love. In a dangerous world, they seek the solace and strength that comes from family and belonging.
These are stories to be savoured slowly and pondered deeply because they cut to the very heart of who we are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lanagan follows White Time, Black Juice, and Red Spikes with a fourth short story collection, featuring 10 singular tales, nearly all of which were previously published in the U.S. and abroad. She opens with the visceral "The Point of Roses," in which a boy's psychic ability to guess what something is a rose, an ashtray, a toy has astonishing consequences: "A sweet-scented shock hit Billy, a velvety punch. Down the slope he tumbled, alone in a storm of blooms." In "An Honest Day's Work," a disabled boy gets a chance to be useful when the local equivalent of shipbreakers bring an aircraft carrier sized alien down out of the "ether" to be stripped for food and spare parts. "Night of the Firstlings" is an eccentric and at times terrifying retelling of the plagues of Egypt, while the collection's new story, "Into the Clouds on High," recalls the author's recent The Brides of Rollrock Island, with a woman caught between the pull of her family and that of her supernatural nature. Haunt-ing, gorgeous, and sometimes painful, Lanagan's stories are unlike anything else in fantasy literature. Ages 14 up.
