Reflecting a fictional timeline into the reader's world adds another layer of credibility to the tale. It's that much easier to imagine the characters in "Labor Day Dinner" taking shape, when you're reading it as Labour Day weekend approaches. Structurally, the story is complex, although at first glance it is
When actress Elizabeth Taylor was appearing in "National Velvet", novelist Elizabeth Taylor (nee Coles) was publishing her first novel, At Mrs Lippincote's. It seems like everybody knows about Elizabeth Taylor the actress; Nicola Beauman's biography considers The Other Elizabeth Taylor. The biographer opens her work by explaining that she is
I wish that I could introduce the narrator of the last story, "Bardon Bus", to Prue. I like to imagine them sitting together in a cozy neighbourhood bar -- nothing fancy, rather the sort of bar to which people go to be heard rather than to be seen -- in
This is how it begins. "Sometimes in the long summer's evenings, which are so marked a part of our youth, Harriet and Vesey played hide-and-seek with the younger children, running across the tufted meadows, their shoes yellow with the pollen of buttercups." Both the novel, and the story of Harriet's
Whimsical and lyrical: Lucy Wood's short stories will touch the curious and sensitive reader who is willing to believe. Houghton Mifflin, 2012 If you like your stories to be rooted in realism, Diving Belles is not for you, but if you enjoy discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary,
