Sunstroke and Other Stories
Truly absorbing… More please' Sunday Express
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Discover this brooding collection of short stories from one of Britain's finest writers. A world where everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends.
A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers pent-up in childcare dream treacherously of other possibilities; a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parents' holiday home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach.
Hidden away inside the present, the past is explosive; the future can open unexpectedly out of any chance encounter; ordinary moments are illuminated with lightning flashes of dread or pleasure. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous.
'She is the writer we didn't know we were waiting for, until she arrived' Anne Enright, Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ten elegant stories from Welsh author Hadley (Everything Will Be All Right) explore the various stages of women's experience. The title story, set at a seaside cottage in Wales and told in an austerely omniscient voice, tracks two attractive early-30ish mothers, one married, the other partnered, who each begin a flirtation with a visiting doctor friend. In "Mother's Son," the other woman in an adulterous affair that ended 20 years before finds herself ruefully counseling her grown son the product of the affair on dealing with his romantic troubles. Each of these beautifully crafted tales (some set in the 1970s) encapsulates a tender, transformative moment for these real characters, such as the provincial vicar's daughter in "Buckets of Blood" sent up to visit her older sister in Cambridge for the week who finds, to her horror and disappointment, her sister reeling from a miscarriage that puts her, like their worn-out mother, among the "ranks of women submerged and knowing amid their biology." In another tale, a man tracks down the now matronly woman who flirted with him when he was a blushing 13-year-old on a seaside holiday with his family 25 years before. Hadley's eerie, knowing portrayals speak to the heart as much as the mind.
