An admirable collection of stories, saturated with acerbic wit and startling empathy.
In Carson’s fifth collection of short stories, Northern Ireland is a place that protects and punishes in equal turn.
The unnamed protagonist of the title story has finally convinced his Spanish girlfriend, with whom he has a tense, confusing relationship, to visit his native Belfast. She has no interest in meeting his family or seeing the places he frequented growing up or even appeasing him. Carson has set this story in an alternate present in which animals seen as obsolete are culled or sent away; what Paola wants to see is the last horse in Britain. The narrator’s daydreams of how lovely it will be to share his hometown with his partner are quickly squashed after they arrive, but he still at one point feels “the gut-twist relief of belonging somewhere specific.” This feeling—at once soothing and nauseating—is present in each of these 16 stories as their characters confront upsetting or deeply frightening obstacles, some absurd, some starkly mundane. In “Grand So,” a couple struggles to keep their jam business afloat. Granda buys a used car for Granny and their granddaughter Ruth to drive around the province, handing out samples, even though “nobody wants to buy luxury jam. This is Northern Ireland. In the eighties. People have other things on their minds.” Ruth discovers that the ghost of the car’s previous owner—a large chain-smoking man she dubs the Backseat Man—is haunting it. Worse, her family is Protestant, and this man is clearly “the other sort of ghost.” “Caravan,” another standout, is told from the point of view of a young girl. Caroline is 10, “almost a grown-up,” and tired of kiddie stuff. Her father promises that if she can fix up the old caravan she and her sister play house in every summer, she can have it as her very own grown-up room. This story’s strengths are in its subtleties, especially its framing of the ways in which the vibrancy of girlhood can lurch, all of a sudden, into the bleak logic of adulthood.
An admirable collection of stories, saturated with acerbic wit and startling empathy.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668056615
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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