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Short Stories

Seen from a boat, approaching the island through cold, choppy, white-flecked seas, the island of Staffa looks like a dense grey forest of rock off the western coast of Scotland. Columns of basalt push up and then flower out into a puffy, cloud-like summit on top of which the plantlife of the island

‘Now, Joshy!’ Wee-lad launches Nanny’s boot off the zipline platform. Her second-hand Clarks carves a small rainbow, bark chippings tumbling from it as it flies. No often he does as he’s telt these days, Alistair thinks. Or so’s he keeps hearing. They’ve been playing ‘Chuck Nanny

After a night in Rome the four of them rent a Fiat, and with Willie behind the wheel they head north on the via Aurelia. While gray clouds threaten rain at first, half an hour later they thin and as they near Cerveteri the sky turns blue and the sun shines bright. In the passenger's seat, Anne si

Kicking the thin sward, he brings up chalk in the roots of knapweed and bladder campion. Eyebright, rockrose, sainfoin. In the morning light, Bee Orchids dance dark and purple against the pale green of marjoram. Sun up. Showtime. Julian is eight and every Saturday his father marches him out of th

When Jill arrived, the paddling pool was already inflated and filled, laid out on the lawn like a huge yellow pet feeding-bowl – if your pet was a diplodocus. She’d always thought there was something prehistoric about her mum’s garden. The trees from the edge of the cemetery craned over the ol

You were there long before I took the form of a {man}. Before I began to steal shapes out of my pregnant {mother}, and before adolescence stole back shapes out of me. You, my grandfather, have always been a man. Stoic and sinewy, you emerged from the delivery room five feet and eleven inches tall a

No matter how much he loosened his tie, Joe could not seem to get enough air into his throat – as if some unseen force was gripping his trachea as hard as he was now gripping the leather of his steering wheel. White lilies. They had ordered pink azaleas and the florist sent them white lilies

In rain, sunshine, mist and high winds we tottered through the fields as fast as Elspeth’s little legs and my dodgy knees allowed. Both of us breathless, we rushed up the hill – more of a hillock really – that Elspeth had named The Big Mountain. The vista from the top encompassed the sweep of