Bingo: You are here – the author lives in my city and my friend circle.
Jane calls this collection of short stories ficto-memoir, created by slicing off little pieces of her life and frying them up in the spice of fiction to make something delicious.
Within the span of twenty-one tales, some don’t stray far from the woman I know, an Englishwoman who has lived in Australia most of her life, a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter, who looks at life with insight, compassion, and a well-honed sense of the ridiculous. Others step further away in time, space and experience to try out how it would feel to be a body floating in the ocean, a lonely caravan dweller pining for a white Christmas, a woman driven to do something dreadful, a ghost hungry for justice, a table.
These stories pull you in, immerse you in the lives, senses and emotions of the people who populate them, language carefully crafted to create shifts of tone from the meditative to the hilarious, studded with little diamonds of description …. the sun’s rays licking at the ocean, a scar like the heat-sealed end of a packet of potato chips, seaweed as vast wigs of unkempt hair, a minuscule bright red pomegranate seed of love, a hand curling inside another like a small warm dormouse.
This is a book to read in bed, savouring a story before you sleep to seed your dreams and send little slices of your own life spinning off into imaginary worlds.
