Collected Stories

A collection of some of the best known and most loved works by one of Scotland's 'most gifted and original writers' (Times Literary Supplement)

A book that can be felt on your pulses. Galloway is a literary endoscopist: she gets beneath the surface of life and exposes the nerves...Writing has rarely been so visceral

Spiky, bleak stories ... moving and poignant. Sometimes you have to read them twice

Her compassion is compassion with bite, her beauty is beauty that stings, and her comfort always comes with a sense of loss. It doesn't make for an easy read, but as with the best medicine, it's good for you

Beautifully crafted and true-to-life stories

Galloway's ear for dialogue is astonishing, almost musical

Scottish writer Janie Galloway has a reputation for going where more polite writers fear to tread..this includes some of the author's most distinctive work...this original collection will wake up the most jaded palate.

Galloway can evoke a life, a relationship, just about the whole human condition, within ten brilliantly written pages

Spikey, bleak stories you won't forget ... poignant stories, all of which stand immediate rereading

Her stories are suggestively musical examples of rich, Glaswegian gothic

At last, Galloway's stories are back in print in one collection...savagely accurate, engaging and funny, she is one of our great contemporary writers

A testament to the sharp eye and shrewd brain of Janice Galloway, one of Scotland's finest writers

Janice Galloway's first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, now widely regarded as a Scottish contemporary classic, was published in 1990 and won the MIND/Allan Lane Book of the Year. Her second novel, Foreign Parts, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters EM Forster Award while her third, Clara, about the tempestuous life of nineteenth-century pianist Clara Wieck Schumann, won the Saltire Award in 2002. Collaborative texts include an opera with Sally Beamish and three cross-discipline works with Anne Bevan, the Orcadian sculptor. Her 'anti-memoir', This Is Not About Me, was published by Granta in September 2008 to universal critical acclaim. She lives in Lanarkshire

Comprising stories from her debut collection, Blood, and the critically acclaimed Where You Find It - this collection presents some of the best known and most loved works by one of Scotland's 'most gifted and original writers' (Times Literary Supplement). 
 
Each sharply observed, savagely accurate and brilliantly realised - the stories offer revelatory glimpses into everyday lives - from an unwelcome act of kindness at a bus stop, an evening walk across a London bridge, a welcome but uncomfortable summer break to a brutal lesson in trust. 
 
Here also are unflinching portrayals of relationships: the struggle to love against the odds, the overpowering yearning to communicate, and the extraordinary epiphanies where the world falls away leaving only the lovers. 
 
These are painstakingly crafted stories: engaging, funny and terrifyingly true, from a master of the form.

Clara

'A gripping narrative - a deeply moving study of love, loss and solitude' Independent on Sunday

Some of the greatest words ever written on thwarted love since Romeo and Juliet

A powerful novel which brings two troubled and brilliant people back to life

A razor-sharp blade of light... This is fiction's raising of Lazarus, miraculous, touched with wonder, grace and utter, steadfast belief in the life being resurrected... A work of intense, unflinching passion and conviction, written with Galloway's heart's blood

Janice Galloway's exciting, vibrant third novel proves a virtuoso piece of storytelling...this obvious Booker contender is as compelling as the tormented players and music that inspired it

You read Clara and you catch the music of another mind, and wherever it comes from Janice Galloway plays the notes to what sounds very much like perfection. This is a virtuoso performance

A novel dizzy with lyrical passages and pulsating with the musical passion of Clara's complicated, tragic love for her husband Robert Schumann

Her limpid prose style is so seductive and so beautiful a fine meditation on art, love and loss...

Janice Galloway's first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, now widely regarded as a Scottish contemporary classic, was published in 1990 and won the MIND/Allan Lane Book of the Year. Her second novel, Foreign Parts, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters EM Forster Award while her third, Clara, about the tempestuous life of nineteenth-century pianist Clara Wieck Schumann, won the Saltire Award in 2002. Collaborative texts include an opera with Sally Beamish and three cross-discipline works with Anne Bevan, the Orcadian sculptor. Her 'anti-memoir', This is not about me, was published by Granta in September 2008 to universal critical acclaim. She lives in Lanarkshire

'A gripping narrative - a deeply moving study of love, loss and solitude' Independent on Sunday 
 
Celebrated nineteenth-century concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms - Clara Schumann was also the wife of Robert Schumann, the mother of his eight children, and the woman who cared for him through a series of crippling mental illnesses. 
 
A lyrical and vibrant account of two remarkable and highly dramatic musical careers, Clara is a novel about timeless, common things: about the inescapable influences of childhood, about creativity and marital life, about communication and silence, about how art is made and how art, in turn, may erode or save the life that nourishes it. 
 
'Some of the greatest words ever written on thwarted love since Romeo and Juliet' The Times

Where You Find It

Galloway's subject is love in all its quirky triumphs and sneaky defeats. Where You Find It confirms the originality and skill which wins her awards... Galloway has the all-important gift of knowing when her stories end, and lethally accurate powers of observation.

The writing can be felt on your pulses. Galloway is a literary endoscopist. She gets beneath the surface of life and exposes the nerves.

She is a quite brilliant observer of the way relationships suddenly turn, of how a look, a gesture, a word can heal or hurt

Fuses a nerve- exposing honesty with deep compassion

Janice Galloway was born in Ayrshire. Her first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, was published in 1990 and won the MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel and Scottish First Book. The stage version has been performed at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, the Harbourfront Festival, Toronto, and the Royal Court in London. her second book, Blood, a collection of stories, was published in 1992. A story from that collection won the Cosmopolitan/Perrier Short Story Award. Her second novel, Foreign Parts, won the 1994 McVitie's Prize. In 1994 she also won the E.M. Forster Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Glasgow.

In her latest collection of stories, Janice Galloway turns her unflinching gaze on relationships: the struggle to love against the odds, the overpowering yearning to communicate, and the extraordinary epiphanies where the World falls away leaving only the lovers. Love is, of course, where you find it, and it is here in an evening walk across a London bridge, a chip-shop pizza, Derek's mouth, or ham sandwiches cut into hearts. A brilliant observer of human frailty and tenderness, Janice Galloway examines the moments where lives split like a stone, where people are healed or broken by a word or the touch of a hand. Savagely accurate, vivid and unsentimental, these are painstakingly crafted stories: engaging, caustic, funny and terrifyingly true.

Foreign Parts

Life on the road observed with a biting sensibility for the awkward and the joyous:a tale as comic as it is poignant.

The book reassures that no matter how many times you've done something or been somewhere, the humiliations remain as burning, the pleasure as sharp as ever

A funny, original, stinging-as-a-nettle, soothing-as-a-dockleaf read

A carefully observed, caustic portrait of two opposites - one prickly, one plodding - and their troublesome but enduring friendship

Every detail...is described with the accuracy of an X-ray and the urgency of poetry

Janice Galloway's first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, now widely regarded as a Scottish contemporary classic, was published in 1990 and won the MIND/Allan Lane Book of the Year. Her second novel, Foreign Parts, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters EM Forster Award while her third, Clara, about the tempestuous life of nineteenth-century pianist Clara Wieck Schumann, won the Saltire Award in 2002. Collaborative texts include an opera with Sally Beamish and three cross-discipline works with Anne Bevan, the Orcadian sculptor. Her 'anti-memoir', This is not about me, was published by Granta in September 2008 to universal critical acclaim. She lives in Lanarkshire

Cassie and Rona. Rona and Cassie. 
 
Two women on a driving holiday in Northern France. 
 
A caustic, coruscating and deeply funny account of morality, dysfunctional relationships and women abroad, Foreign Parts is that rare hybrid: a strikingly original novel about real life, told with accuracy, compassion and a truly saturnine delight.

Blood

Janice Galloway's first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, now widely regarded as a Scottish contemporary classic, was published in 1990 and won the MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year. Her second novel, Foreign Parts, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award while her third, Clara, about the tempestuous life of nineteenth-century pianist Clara Wieck Schumann, won the Saltire Award in 2002. Collaborative texts include an opera with Sally Beamish and three cross-discipline works with Anne Bevan, the Orcadian sculptor. Her 'anti-memoir', This Is Not About Me, was published by Granta in September 2008 to universal critical acclaim. She lives in Lanarkshire.

'BLOOD is a virtuoso work: the writing sinewy and beautiful. . . the integrity of vision coruscating; the whole driven by the author's restless experimentation with form. And at least two stories, 'Blood' itself and 'Fearless', will certainly end up in anthologies: not Best Scottish Writers, or Best Women Writers, but quite simply, Best' New Statesman and Society. 
 
'I remember reading a story by Janice Galloway for the first time; its urgency of voice, that certainty of expression, I wondered why I hadn't heard of her before; then discovered that she was altogether new to writing. It was some debut. She really is a fine writer' James Kelman 
 
'Blood is a virtuoso work: the writing sinewy and beautiful...the integrity of vision coruscating; the whole driven by the author's restless experimentation with form. And at least two stories, 'Blood' itself and 'Fearless', will certainly end up in anthologies: not Best Scottish Writers, or Best Women Writers, but, quite simply, best' New Statesman 
 
'A salutary collection...A marvellous revelation. A writer of passion and virtuosity shines through' Scotland on Sunday 
 
'Genuinely unnerving...she is a fierce, troubling new writer' Observer 
 
'Galloway flecks her hard-edged realism with impressionist grace-notes, a potent mixture that confirms her...as one of Scotland's best young writers' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'There is ample proof in Blood of Galloway's unassailable talent. Marvellously funny and beautifully paced' Glasgow Herald

Janice Galloway

A real achievement; its dialogue sparks and its voice is true. For Janice Galloway the trick is simply to keep writing

This is like a Scottish Catcher in the Rye. You actually feel you’re inside this woman’s head, it is that visceral. And having experienced a downward spiral myself, I so admire her accuracy in every detail

An account from the inside of a mind cracking up...its writing is as taut as a bowstring. From brilliant title to closing injunction, it hums with intelligence, clarity, wit; and, its heroine's struggle for order and meaning seduces our minds, exposes how close we all of us are to insanity. Joy, as Galloway's heroine reluctantly lets us know that she's called, is simply that dangerous step or two nearer the edge

This remarkably original work has gained Janice Galloway an almost immediate reputation as one of Scotland's most interesting serious prose writers

What’s remarkable about this novel is that despite its dark themes, it manages to be uplifting… Joy Stone…is witty, warm and unfailingly honest about her hopes and fears.

Poignant and original...a wonderfully sensitive portrait of a woman who doesn't give up trying to find the "trick" to making life go on

From the corner of a darkened room Joy Stone watches herself. As memories of the deaths of her lover and mother surface unbidden, life for Joy narrows – to negotiating each day, each encounter, each second; to finding the trick to keep living. Told with shattering clarity and wry wit, this is a Scottish classic fit for our time.

Janice Galloway

Praise for The Trick Is To Keep Breathing

A real achievement; its dialogue sparks and its voice is true. For Janice Galloway the trick is simply to keep writing

This is like a Scottish Catcher in the Rye. You actually feel you’re inside this woman’s head, it is that visceral. And having experienced a downward spiral myself, I so admire her accuracy in every detail

Claustrophobic but extraordinary

A real achievement; its dialogue sparks and its voice is true. For Janice Galloway the trick is simply to keep writing

This is like a Scottish Catcher in the Rye. You actually feel you’re inside this woman’s head, it is that visceral. And having experienced a downward spiral myself, I so admire her accuracy in every detail

Claustrophobic but extraordinary

A real achievement; its dialogue sparks and its voice is true. For Janice Galloway the trick is simply to keep writing

This is like a Scottish Catcher in the Rye. You actually feel you’re inside this woman’s head, it is that visceral. And having experienced a downward spiral myself, I so admire her accuracy in every detail

Claustrophobic but extraordinary

Books by Janice Galloway

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