16th April, 2013

Two New Short Story Collections

Think you don’t like short stories? Think again. Seren have published two fantastic short story collections this Spring, you need these on your reading shelf – now!
Mary-Ann Constantine’s second collection All the Souls and Jaki McCarrick’s The Scattering are both now available to buy.

All the Souls by Mary-Ann Constantine is a collection of stories of the living and the dead.
The voices of the dead echo through these subtle, striking stories. Rooted in the landscape and traditions of Wales and Brittany – past, present and future – All the Souls draws on themes of collection, superstition and legend.
From poignant and dangerous obsessions with the iconic (a Romano-British figurine; a carved wooden Christ-child; a bronze angel) to direct, often puzzled conversations with ghosts, the characters in this book all strive to make contact with the impossible. A girl becomes obsessed with a figure she only sees through a Camera Obscura; an angry man strikes up a friendship with a sixth-century saint; a revenant mother by a mountain lake tries to explain herself to a grieving friend.
‘A considerable achievement.’ – Stevie Davies on The Breathing

Paperback £8.99

The Scattering is a collection of nineteen stories, many set on the Irish border, where this London-born author currently lives. These stories explore states of liminality: life on the Irish border, dual identities, emigration, being between states – certainty and doubt, codependency and freedom. Some explore themes of catastrophe and constraint. All explore what it means to be alive in a fraught and ever-changing world. This first collection from prizewinning author and playwright, Jaki McCarrick explores the dark side of human nature, often with a postmodern ‘Ulster gothic’ twist.
One of the stories ‘The Visit’ won the Wasafiri Prize for new fiction, and many have been published to much acclaim in literary magazines.
“…an amazing body of work…this book deserves tremendous success and a very wide readership.” – The Reading Life Blog
Paperback £8.99