Sometimes life doesn’t give you time to read a novel, even when what you desire is intriguing characters, layers of meaning and settings full of depth. At times like these, the short story comes into its own.
These twelve short-story collections offer everything you’re looking for from fiction, and can be read from cover to cover in a couple of sittings, or savoured story by story over a longer period, allowing you to dip in when you have some time to spare…
Homesickness is the second book from the ‘exact and poetic’ (New York Times ) winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. An emotionally resonant and wonderfully wry collection, it follows the lives of outcasts, misfits and malcontents from County Mayo to Canada.
In these eight character-driven tales, you will find a quiet night in a local pub shattered by the arrival of a sword-wielding fugitive; a funeral party teetering on the edge of this world and the next, as ghosts simply won’t lay in wake; a veteran policewoman confronting the banality of her own existence in the face of a shooting; and an aspiring writer grappling with his father’s cancer diagnosis and, in his despair, wreaking havoc on his mentor’s life.
Sally Rooney called Homesickness ‘a mesmerisingly powerful book, full of the strangeness and beauty of life . . . these stories are his best yet.’
This book brings together a collection of stories by Elizabeth Bowen, chosen and introduced by author Tessa Hadley.
Taking in her native Ireland and the streets of London after the Blitz, the stories involve a girl with a secret den, a couple strolling through a ruined city and a teacher who dreams of killing her pupil.
Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899. Her first book, Encounters , also a collection of short stories, was published in 1923, with her first novel, The Hotel , following four years later. In an essay for the London Review of Books
Cheever’s career spanned almost fifty years, during which time his short stories – often published in the New Yorker – gave voice to an America that was seeing huge changes, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.
In his obituary, the New York Times
With stories hand-picked by Julian Barnes, A Vision of the World is the first authorised selected collection of Cheever’s short fiction. Cheever, who wrote four novels and more than 100 short stories, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in his lifetime.
Inspired by horror fiction, myths and fairy tales, Apple and Knife is the debut collection from celebrated Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha.
Paramaditha’s tales are set in the everyday – a boardroom, a shanty town, a dangdut stage – but use the supernatural to explore the dangers and power of occupying a female body in today’s world.
Tatler
Bernard MacLaverty’s work is deceptively simple on the surface, but carries a turbulent undertow.
In ‘Blackthorns’, a poor, out-of-work Catholic man falls gravely ill in the sectarian Northern Ireland of 1942, but is brought back from the brink by an unlikely saviour. ‘The End of Days’ imagines the last moments in the life of painter Egon Schiele, watching his wife dying of Spanish flu – the world’s worst pandemic in recent history. Everywhere, the dark currents of violence, persecution and regret pull at his subject matter: family love, the making of art, Catholicism, the Troubles and ageing.
Kenyan writer and academic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes political novels and plays, and was imprisoned in 1977 for over a year by an authoritarian Kenyan regime after he staged a play in his native tongue, Gikuyu.
Secret Lives and Other Stories , first published in 1975, is as political as his other work, and addresses the forces of colonialism, the pervasive threat of nature and the meeting between magic and superstition.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called wa Thiong’o ‘one of the greatest writers of our time’.
In his latest short-story collection, Roddy Doyle tackles our shared but unique experiences of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. From travellers trapped overseas to exhausted nurses, Doyle dips into the lives of a host of characters with his signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives.
The Observer wrote: ‘In the stripping away of everyday anxieties, the virus reveals what matters most, those qualities that are always at the heart of Doyle’s fiction: love and connection.’
Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness and the shifting of history beneath our feet.
Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2019 and the Gordon Burn Prize 2019, Heads of the Colored People is a collection of stories exploring Black life and experience.
Thompson-Spires’s wry works interrogate the supposedly post-racial era we’re living in through a series of scenarios and settings: a teenager is insidiously bullied as her YouTube following soars; an assistant professor finds himself losing a subtle war against his office mate; a nurse is worn down by the demand for her skills as a funeral singer.
Thompson-Spires’s work has appeared in the White Review , the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly , the Feminist Wire and more.
George Saunders, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo , is also a master of the short story; his collection Tenth of December won the inaugural Folio Prize.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is Saunders’s first collection, and offers a dark and funny vision of a near future. Saunders takes readers on a trip to the shopping malls, theme parks and environmental hazards that lie just around the chronological corner, introducing a gang of misfits and losers struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world.
The Guardian
Across the seven tales within his Sunday Times -bestselling collection, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all.
The short story ‘Drive My Car’ was recently adapted into a three-hour-long epic road movie, which took home the 2022 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, making this the perfect time to pick up the collection.
Kirsty Logan’s collection explores women’s fears, from female bodies to domestic claustrophobia, desire, violence and more.
Through chilling contemporary fairy tales to disturbing supernatural fiction, Logan tells the story of a woman in Iceland alone in a remote house; another who can only find respite from the clinging ghost that follows her by submerging herself in an overgrown pool; and a schoolgirl who becomes obsessed with the female anatomical models in a museum.
Suzi Feay in the Guardian
A set of twisted fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is one of the most famous feminist short-story collections ever.
The stories within are not only retellings, but also new stories created by Carter and first published in 1979; The Bloody Chamber was her second short-story collection.
‘Her work caused shock waves when it appeared, and it continues to shock,’ wrote Helen Simpson in a reflection on the book in the Guardian
