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Short Stories

Eve of D-Day They were so, so young, but to Sheila, squinting out from the stage into the bright lights rigged up in the tent, they looked already old. Every show she did, they looked the same. It was hard to make out faces, peering through the dust-speckled beams of the spotlights, the generato

When he asked me if I was the writer I just laughed. You know the laugh. You once described it as drier than a corked bottle of Chardonnay and no less unpleasant. But he persevered, told me he had a story for me. What is it about people and writers? Would they tell a painter that they had a picture

Custard Walker lived small and private, her life pent up inside self-made borders, pitted by absent dreams and a tough reality.   Custard Walker flickered with a worn beauty, her hair uncurling with time and its red fire fading gently into grey. Her eyes had paled to the colour of lime ma

‘I think you’re so brave, travelling alone.’ Lily-Mae’s accent was warm. She’d already asked if my daughter Aaliya had siblings and told me ‘Oh, that’s OK,’ when I said no. I was occasionally told I was too young to be a widow. Four years ago he hadn’t survived a head-on collision

When Natasha went away, he kept finding things she had left behind. A map of Belsize Park under the sofa cushions. An article torn out of the newspaper with a sentence underlined in purple felt tip in the pocket of the dressing gown she’d liked to borrow. Six numbers on a lolly stick caught betwee

It was a miserable evening in November. Odilio – legendary restaurant critic for England’s most prestigious food magazine – bound purposefully along the shiny, waterlogged pavement, through the crowd of rain-drenched commuters, ducking into shelter every so often, skipping the puddles and poth

Loveday stretched and turned over in bed. Treve snored gently beside her, not even stirring. Through the window, the moon was in its final quarter and clouds were drifting across it, thick enough to cast a shadow, but not enough that the light was completely extinguished. She got up quietly and p

Part One It is siesta time in the town. Today, the silence of slumber is more complete even than usual, since the only citizen permitted to continue work after the midday curfew bell has for once elected to waive the privilege. His sleep seems all the deeper for its rarity, but no one could say tha

MONDAY Carol is so sad. She hasn’t gone downstairs to make the pasta bake and she hasn’t put her trousers on and she hasn’t replied to her boyfriend and she hasn’t called her brother and she hasn’t made a doctor’s appointment and she hasn’t fixed her skin and she hasn’t started he

Tara sat in front of the washing machine. She looked at the way the clothes moved in circles, sometimes showing a little bit of colour but mostly just black; she listened to the machine, a constant hum that echoed in the room where she waited. She thought about the way the clothes resembled a hurric