Rating: 4 out of 5

The best collection of short stories I’ve read in quite a while. I’m not, generally, a fan of the genre finding them insubstantial. These have proper characters in them and they all link together which makes them seem less insular and more substantial. And I like her turn of phrase.

Highlighted passages:

We are at the centre of our own stories. And sometimes it is hard to believe that we are not at the centre of other peoples. But I love the fact that you can brush past a person with your own story, your own life, so big in your mind and at the same time be a simple passer-by in someone else’s. A walk-on part

Stories are important. We need them. It is through telling and hearing stories that we make sense of the world

When I write – whether it’s fiction or plays, and even when I adapt other people’s novels for radio – I make lots of cuts. Words go. Descriptions go. Passages. Chapters. And sometimes, yes, entire characters. As much as I may like those words or descriptions or characters, if they are holding up the story and getting in its way, they end up being deleted. And this is why I have the idea of my caravan (where I write) being stuffed with people I have cut from my writing. Binny, for example, who is the main character in the first story of this collection, was no more than an extra in an early draft of my second novel Perfect, but she was too big for the book and threatened to over-topple it. Very reluctantly I cut her. Henry, who ‘lives’ in the title story, was originally a rehearsal for a character in the new novel I’m working on called The Music Shop. Alan and Alice, the married couple in the second story, were once in an afternoon play and had ambitions for bigger things – a film maybe, but that never happened. Then there is a story about a young woman called Maureen going to a local dance, and while I kept her in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, I couldn’t keep the story of how her life changed that night. Sometimes I picture all these ‘cut’ characters stuffed in my caravan, making a nuisance of themselves, and the racket is quite something. So I loved the idea that I could clean them out, as it were, by giving each of them a short story of their own. (I still have a batch of curates that I had to delete when I was dramatizing Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley for BBC Radio 4. They spend entire days in my caravan gossiping and drinking tea, and I have no idea what I am going to do with them. If you would like to adopt them, they

To cry was to acknowledge that something was well and truly over.

There is much to do, much to prepare, much to mend, but it cannot be done in a day and sometimes it is better to do one small thing.

he had been loved, he was loved, and he too could love.

This was how it was, she thought. People would find one another, and sometimes it would last moments and sometimes it would last years.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account