Release Date:- 2012-02-21
Reviews Counts:- 29
User Average Rating:- 4
Availability:- In Stock
Kind:- ebook
A new collection of storiesādazzling, poignant, wickedly funny, and highly addictiveāby the internationally acclaimed writer whose work The Times (London) calls ādangerously close to perfection.ā These thirteen stories brilliantly focus on aspects of contemporary living and unerringly capture a generation, a type, a social class, a pattern of behavior. They give us the small detail that reveals large secrets and summons up the inner stresses of our lives (āIt is a blissful relief to turn to the coolness and clarity of Helen Simpson . . . She is, to my mind, the best short story writer now working in Englishā āEd Crooks, Financial Times). Whether her subject is single women or wives in stages of midlife-ery, marriage or motherhood, youth, young love, homework, or history, Simpson writes near to the bone and close to the heart.
In one story, a squirrel trapped under a dustbin lid in the back garden vanishes, and a womanās marriage is revealed in the process . . . In another, a young woman on her way for an MRI reflects on new love, electromagnetism, and Sherlock Holmes, and afterward goes to a museum and finds herself wanting to escape into one of the paintings.
And in the title story, two men on a flight from London to Chicagoāone an elderly scientist, the other a businessman upgraded to first classādiscuss climate change and what flying is doing to āour shrunken planet,ā this while the āin-flight entertainmentā shows the crop-duster scene from Hitchcockās North by Northwest. When a passenger in the seat across the aisle suddenly becomes ill and dies, the plane is forced to land in Goose Bay, Labrador, to the utter frustration of the two men. In the storyās moment of reckoning, one of the men, furious at the delay, says to the other, āI donāt care about you. You donāt care about me. We donāt care about him [the deceased passenger]. We all know how to put ourselves first, and thatās what makes the world go round.ā
These darkly comic, brave, and, says The Guardian, ādeeply unsentimentalā stories brilliantly evoke lifeās truest sensationsālove, pain, joy, and griefāand give us, with precision and complex economy, a shrewd and painfully true glimpse into our dizzying 3-D age.
