Q&A: Jane Rogers on her new short story collection, FIRE-READY

 

"In fiction you can test things out and examine both sides of a question. I write to explore."

Photograph by Linda Newbery

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, plus radio drama and stories. Her subject matter ranges from the past to the present to the distant future. Prizes include the Arthur C Clarke Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Writers Guild Best Fiction Book Award. Jane’s new collection of short stories, Fire-Ready, was published by Comma Press this November. 

Jane teaches writing at all levels, currently running workshops for MsLexia and mentoring for Gold Dust. Find out more from her website. Here she answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations on publishing your second collection of short stories, following Hitting Trees with Sticks (2012). In between, you’ve written two novels and several radio dramas and adaptations, including Clear Light of Day, a dramatisation of Anita Desai’s novel which was broadcast this summer on BBC Radio 4. What draws you to the short story form?

Jane: Thanks Linda. I think of myself really as a novelist, and I find the short story form extremely challenging. Very occasionally there's an idea which presents itself immediately as a short story (like the title story of Hitting Trees with Sticks), and that is great. But more often, it’s a question of endless revision and cutting and battling to actually locate the story in the mass of ideas and words of a first draft. As a reader, I used to think stories were slightly inferior to novels; then I read Alice Munro, and I realised that a really well-crafted story can contain as much as a novel, if the writer is skilful enough. But it is a different craft from writing a novel. I suppose I have written in lots of different forms; radio, TV, adaptation, novel and short story – I quite like a challenge! At the end of the day, I tend to feel more confident about my novels than my stories.

(By the way, off topic, I know many people now disapprove of Alice Munro so strongly that they have stopped reading her. Yes, it seems she behaved badly in her personal life. But quite frankly, if we stopped reading authors who have behaved badly – well, as King Lear says, Who shall ’scape whipping?)

L: One striking thing about this collection, and of your novels too, is the range of subjects and genres you cover. Here we move from the present to the near and more distant future; some stories could be classed as sci-fi, cli-fi (climate fiction) or even veer towards horror (Clearances) while others are tender explorations of domestic life and relationships, one of which, Treasure, I suspect comes from your own experience with a grandchild. A thread that links them is the struggle of ordinary people to find purpose in life, to make space for themselves, to appreciate everyday pleasures. Some are bound by duty or by the restrictions of lockdown; in more than one, the birth or prospect of a baby offers hope and a glimpse of uncomplicated innocence.

How did this collection come about? I see that several have been published before, while most are new. How did the idea of a new compilation come to you? Fire-Ready is the title story – was that always your choice of title, and does it suggest a unifying theme?

J: It’s a good question, and to begin with I couldn’t really figure out if this was a collection or not. I certainly didn’t sit down to write a collection – the stories have accumulated over years, and I was not able to find many common themes between them. My editor, Ra Page, was helpful here, because he identified four interlinked themes; the climate emergency, activism, and aging and relationships with children. Together we eliminated the weakest stories, and he suggested I write an additional cli-fi story, to even out the balance. So I have spent most of my writing time for the past 4 months working on the opening story, Hope. 

I was surprised when I realised how many are about parents (or a single parent) and children, but then I realised that in fact that is a central theme in several of my novels.

And re the title – I hope it does suggest a unifying theme. The term is actually used in Australian government warnings about bushfires. Farms in the path of fires have to be made ‘fire-ready’, that is to say, with sprinklers on the roof, shutters, reserves of water, an underground spot where important documents can be securely left, and so on. And more generally, characters in some of the other stories are trying to make their homes or lives ‘fire-ready’, in the sense that they know they will be tested.

L: For one of your Writers Review contributions, you chose Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, in which he asks: ‘What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction?’ In the eight years since his book’s publication, that’s changed, with books such as The Overstory, Orbital and The Deluge featuring on shortlists. But still, fiction that portrays the climate emergency in the context of ordinary present-day lives seems rare. Some of your stories do just that – Fire-Ready, set in Australia, sees Kayla preparing for the very real threat of wildfire, while others look at likely changes to society and adaptations in our behaviour. Climate concerns run through this collection but without dominating – did you feel that the balance between bleakness and hope was important?

J: Like many people, I am haunted by the climate emergency, and the thought of the devastated world we are leaving to our descendants. I set out to write a novel on the topic, soon after reading The Great Derangement. To begin with I read as much future fiction as I could find, and quickly realised that novels which simply focus on a very bleak future are simultaneously depressing and rather preachy. There are a lot; I could give you a list of titles not to read, but that would be cruel! Two which deal with the topic much more imaginatively are Bewilderment by Richard Powers, and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Both highly recommended. There’s no point in writing doom and gloom, everyone knows it and it doesn’t make anything better. I don’t think I was trying to create a balance between bleakness and hope (though I am glad if that’s the effect!) I think I was trying to examine specific situations through the minds and experiences of my characters. Human beings are wonderfully adaptable, so that even in bleak situations, hope and joy can be found. For example, in Hope, the child Kara who has been evacuated from a no-longer-viable Earth, is thrilled by the sight of distant stars and galaxies in deep space. As individuals, we feel pleasure as well as pain, and good writing describes individual experiences which are universally recognisable.

L: The hope in many of the stories comes through a kind of epiphany, and I love the way you show these – not in any flash-of-light sense but more a kind of quiet acceptance, especially for your older characters. More than one of these is faced with a rearrangement of their life following release from the duty of care to a relative or partner – situations I feel sure will resonate with many readers.

J: Yes, there’s quite a lot about growing older – I guess the topic is on my mind, now I’m in my eighth decade! Again, I’m interested in the pleasure, or relief, of letting things go in older age – as well as the grieving for the past. ‘Letting things go’ is probably the story I am most pleased with, because I was afraid readers might find it quite mad that my protagonist can happily lose himself for hours in sounds from the distant past; but so far the responses have been very positive.

L: There’s humour too, in Weeping Beech and in The DNA of Bats. You must have given a lot of thought to the ordering of the stories?

J: Ha. Indeed. And since I carefully ordered them, they have been re-ordered so many times by my editor that I honestly can’t tell if it works or not. Readers will have to let me know!

L: I want to ask about the final story, The Night Before, without giving too much away. Anyone who’s campaigned (as we both have) with Extinction Rebellion has been told, in connection with roadblocks etc, “I like what you do but not the way you’re going about it”. But what actually does make the kind of difference needed to confront the climate emergency? Your character here, Szandra, is on the brink of doing something most activists would (fortunately) baulk at – but can such an action be justified? She’s questioning herself about that, right up to the abrupt shock of the ending. Can you tell us how this story took shape?

J: It began as a ‘What if?’ What if you were asked to do something which is really dangerous, which will have tragic consequences, in the service of a cause in which you believe passionately? I love the fact that you can explore an idea in a story, test it out, see how far you can go. I have been asked if I agree with or condemn the characters’ plan in that story. And the answer is, neither. That’s not the point. Any more than I agree with or condemn Jessie Lamb’s action, in my novel of that name. The point is to honestly explore an idea, an action, the potential consequences. In fiction you can test things out and examine both sides of a question. I write to explore.

L: More generally, how does a short story idea come to you? Does it arrive in your head complete, as it were – I mean the shape of it, the point? Or do you discover that through writing?

J: It really varies, from story to story. That’s one of the maddening things about writing, isn’t it? It never gets any easier, you have to re-invent the wheel each time. I usually have a sense of what’s at the heart of the story, but how to reach that, or, as you put it, ‘the shape of it’ – that is something I have to work out as I go along.Weeping Beech, for example; my idea was for a tree surgeon who couldn’t bear to fell a beautiful tree. So he was conflicted. Gradually, as I worked on it, the conflict became externalised, and his opponent became, not his own appreciation of the tree, but a retired parks and gardens employee who knows all the old trees in the town. Other characters came in to take sides, and I was pleased (especially with the nosy neighbour!) because the story became funnier.

L. The reader learns to adapt quickly to each new story: learning not only about the characters and their relationships but about where we are in time, how society has changed and how new rules and conventions dominate their lives. You’re adept at conveying these things without overwhelming the reader. Does beginning a short story feel very different from beginning a novel?

J: You have to establish the world of the story very quickly – so yes, that is a difference. In a novel the reader is usually content to be drip-fed information that builds a picture of the novel’s world, and in fact, in a novel, that slow release of information can be part of the suspense. What’s fascinating is how little the reader needs, to understand they are in a different time and place. And that’s something I’ve learned through cutting my stories. For example, in Daytrip to Glastonbury, the opening paragraph describes the coach journey towards Glastonbury along recognisable A roads. But the coach stops at Wells. ‘From Wells the only way was by boat.’ Suddenly the reader is transported to a future where swathes of the country are underwater. No date or backstory is needed.

L. You’ve done a great deal of tuition and mentoring, at Sheffield Hallam and with Mslexia, Faber Academy and Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. What advice do you give to students about writing short stories?

J: Well, I could give you the outline of the five-day short story course I’m going to teach for Faber Academy in the new year . . . But that might be a bit much! I guess the single most important thing is CUT. It is amazing how much you can cut out of a story, and how every cut seems to improve it. All the cliches are true; Get in late, get out early. Cut adverbs. Strip down adjectives. Make every word work. I think short story as a craft is closer to poetry than it is to novel.

L. Finally, what are you working on now?

J: A novel! And it’s only tangentially about the climate emergency.

Thanks for your thoughtful questions, they have really made me focus on the stories and why I wrote them.

Fire-Ready is published by Comma Press.

Read Jane's review of The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

Guest review by Carla McKay: METAMORPHOSIS - selected stories by PENELOPE LIVELY

 

"Surely one of the most gifted and prodigious literary writers of our times ..."

Carla McKay, now retired, has been a Fleet Street journalist for most of her career, the most rewarding post being Fiction Editor of the Daily Mail where she could indulge her love of reading during working hours. She has had two books published: The Folly of French Kissing, a light hearted novel set among ex-pats in the south of France, and The Reluctant Yogi about her middle-aged discovery of Yoga and all its benefits.

Having struggled too long with much of contemporary fiction as characterised by the unfathomable and frankly uninteresting offerings of millennial favourites like Sally Rooney, as well as shedloads of formulaic ‘psychological’ crime thrillers, it has been a tremendous relief to return to what (in my old-fashioned way) I call ‘proper storytellers’. Foremost among these is the brilliant Penelope Lively, surely one of the most gifted and prodigious literary writers of our times, now, at 88, sadly coming towards the end of her writing career.

What joy it is to revisit all those novels! In her first novel for adults, The Road to Lichfield (1977), she established early on one of her enduring themes – the lasting effect of the past upon the present – and examines with piercing insight and sensibility two staples of the human condition, Dying and Loving. Future novels, which never disappointed, included the dazzling Booker Prize winner in 1987, Moon Tiger, about a dying historian recalling her incestuous love affair with her brother. Two others, for me, stand out: Judgment Day, a perfect evocation of English village life and an unforgiveable death; and Passing On in which a shy brother and sister are finally able to cast aside the long shadow thrown by a monstrous mother.

For an excellent introduction to Penelope Lively’s extraordinary talent, look no further than Metamorphosis, in which she has selected the best of her published short stories over the years with the addition of two new longer stories bookending the collection, both written recently.

An archaeologist manquee, Lively has peerless skills in characterisation, recognising the layers upon layers of matter which make up a person, or indeed, a place. A person is many versions of himself or herself. Can you ever really know yourself? Can you know anyone? These questions preoccupy Lively here in several stories, especially in one of the new stories, Songs of Praise, where the death of Martha prompts family and friend diverse recollections. What they don’t know is the life-changing secret that Martha and her husband have kept all their lives. In the title story, Metamorphosis, or the Elephant’s Foot, Lively’s preoccupation with aspects of change such as coming of age, the march of time, shifting perspectives, comes to the fore. Harriet’s life history here spans the 20th century, each part of which is symbolised through inanimate objects. The first object, an umbrella stand fashioned out of an elephants’s foot standing in a house in London’s Harley Street in 1915, is perhaps the most literal and poignant metamorphosis: ‘The long-dead elephant had its foot – all four feet – in the 19th century and in the heart of Africa. It is - was – a long way away in every sense, but also relentlessly here, in early 20th century London, doing duty as a receptacle for umbrellas.’

“In deepest Devon, in 1947, Mrs Bennet lived on. Not as such, you understand, fictional or otherwise, but in the person of a Mrs Landon, Frances Landon, who was married to a man of deficient means, and had three daughters, now of marriageable age” begins one story. How could one not read on? Two of the said daughters efficiently marry into the local gentry but the third, Imogen, a rebel, chooses not to, and yet it is one of Immy’s great-great-great granddaughters whose emphatic tones, heard in a future century, are those of Britain’s second woman prime minister. “And so the century proceeded, to a time when the shade of Mrs Bennet would be laid to rest, except perhaps in some moribund enclave of the upper classes”.

Lively is occasionally mocked for seeming to concentrate on the middle/upper classes but this is unfair for they too don’t always escape Lively’s dry wit and laser-like observation. Such is the case in The Weekend, where a reluctant guest surveys her hostess’s lavish second home in the Cotswolds with all the standard accoutrements: “She hated this kitchen, from its rich green Aga (of course) through the row of copper pans slung from one wall, and the butcher’s block, and the dresser with pretty Victorian china (of course) and the shelf of Le Creuset casseroles in every size and shape. She hated it because she wanted it.”

Oh, how I envy you if you haven’t yet read her!

Metamorphosis - Selected Stories is published by Fig Tree.  

Carla McKay's The Reluctant Yogi is published by Gibson Square Books.

Guest review by Julia Jarman: OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout

"Isn’t that why reading is fascinating – it reveals what we don’t and can’t know about each other in real life?"

Photograph by Linda Newbery

Julia Jarman has written books for children of all ages. Her work includes The Time Travelling Cat series for readers of eight to twelve or thereabouts and the acclaimed picture book, Big Red Bath. She is currently trying her hand at writing for adults ‘to see if I can’.

Olive Kitteridge, a retired maths teacher, lives in Crosby, a seaside town in Maine, USA, which is the constant in these short stories. Sometimes central, sometimes peripheral, Olive moves in and out of them as she does in the community, influencing and influenced by the other inhabitants, though I need to qualify what I mean by ‘influenced by’. Olive is cranky and contradictory and always, always herself, so it would be more accurate to say she’s ‘affected by’ other inhabitants rather than influenced. She reacts to other people, but she is also proactive, a law unto herself, often barging in where others would fear to tread, sometimes saving a situation, as in Incoming Tide where her intervention stops a man, a former pupil, from committing suicide; sometimes making it worse, as in A Little Burst when she overhears the bride, her new daughter-in-law, criticising the dress she’s wearing and worse, mortifyingly, her mothering. What has her son said about her? What criticism has he made? Olives suffers and takes revenge. Overweight, under-charmed, amazingly intuitive, she arouses strong feelings in the people she comes across – and in readers. Our book group divided into those who thought it the best book they’d read in ages, because the characters were so real, and those who couldn’t finish it for the same reason. ‘I know there are people like that in real life,’ said one, ‘but I don’t want to read about them.’

I crave books which show me how things are. I loved the late Margaret Forster for giving me those sort of books. I don’t want dystopias – hate them. I don’t want make-believe – can rarely engage with other writers’ fantasies though I create my own, but I do want books which throw light on how we are. To be honest, I might avoid Olive in real life, unless perhaps by lucky chance I’d discovered her hidden depths, but I find reading about her fascinating and keep returning to these stories, always finding something I’d missed. And isn’t that why reading is fascinating – it reveals what we don’t and can’t know about each other in real life? Books are better than real life. I remember a character in Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes saying books were great because they ‘sliced the top off people’s heads’ so you could see inside. Exactly.

Part of the fascination of Olive is to do with the fact that she can’t pretend. She can’t tell the social lies most of us tell to keep things running smoothly. So she’s rude and inhospitable when her nice-to-everyone husband invites a young couple to dinner – after she has said she doesn’t want him to, because after a hard day’s work, she doesn’t want to cook fancy food and be sociable; and also maybe, because she’s intuited that her husband is a little enamoured by the young wife, his employee, not that he realises this. He’s so nice he doesn’t know himself, well not the not-so-nice bits. Is that why we admirers admire Olive? Because she does know herself, or is willing to find out, because she dares where we daren’t?

Olive is complex and complicated and it is of course the writing which conveys this with amazing economy. Each short story is like a mini-novel and added together they are like a maxi-novel in the way they reveal human nature in all its variety. I love The Piano Player, a story in which Olive has only a walk-on role. Focused on one night in the life of Angela O’Meara who plays the piano in the cocktail lounge of a local eating place, it spans generations of several lives, shows how others see her and why they see her as they do, and reveals her as loving and loveable, in marked contrast to some of the major players in her life. Be warned, there is cruelty. I love . . . but I love all these stories, none more though than A Little Burst where Olive is central. Wounded by that daughter-in-law, Olive aches to make her understand. ‘She would like to say, Listen, Dr Sue, deep down there is a thing inside me and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me.’ She is picturing the depression and the grief – after her own father committed suicide - that stopped her being the sort of mother she wanted to be, but also possibly the dark side of her character, of all our characters. Am I fanciful in seeing the squid as serpent? It’s the author’s ability to make us see, the external and the internal, that makes these stories so intense and vivid. They are I think modern morality tales, showing us good and bad characters, not simplistically, not in black and white, but in shades of grey, the tone, dark or light, depending where they come on a scale of cruelty to kindness.

And Olive is kind, mostly.

Olive Kitteridge is published by Scrivener / Simon & Schuster

See also: Elizabeth and Amy by Elizabeth Strout, reviewed by Jane Bailey

Guest review by Karen McCombie: FOLK by Zoe Gilbert

"Hurray for stepping out of your comfort zone and trying a genre you’re never normally attracted to ..."

Karen McCombie writes full-time for children and teens. Most of her books are contemporary, but her latest novels – Little Bird Flies and Little Bird Lands – are set in 1860s Scotland and America respectively. Carnegie-nominated Little Bird Flies is an adventure set on a remote Scottish island, with a backdrop of the Highland Clearances, a dark period in British history which saw many poor crofting families from the Highlands and Islands forced to emigrate to survive. Newly published Little Bird Lands – Karen’s 94th book – follows the fortunes of Bridie and her family as they settle first in New York, before a true-life terrorist attack sees them on the move once again, hoping to find somewhere to call home.

If you ask me what genre of film I like the least, my knee-jerk reaction would be to forcefully yelp “musicals!”, and yet Cabaret is one of my favourite ever movies. There are a whole host of bands I’m not keen on, but then I’ve had the chance to see several play live and their music suddenly all makes sense. Fantasy is something I’m not too keen on either, but after my husband Tom read out a pithy review of Game of Thrones in Rolling Stone magazine – “Fantasy for people who hate fantasy” – I gave it a try and was a devotee of all ten series.

Which brings me to my book choice… Tom bought me Folk  by Zoe Gilbert as a birthday present. The cover – like a trippy William Morris print, complete with roses, birds and speckles of blood – was a thing of beauty. But once I read the back blurb my heart sank a little. It was a collection of short, folkloric stories, neither of which I’m particularly a fan of. Anticipating my slight dip in enthusiasm, Tom burst out, “It’s got great reviews. I bet Kate Bush would love it!” Curse him, he knew that would hit a nerve!

And so I dived into the world of a remote island life, with interweaving tales of the community stretching lazily over years, and I didn’t want to leave. Life on the island is full of wonders and it is harsh; straight from the offset we see a playful ritual for the village teenagers go tragically wrong, with youthful Crab Skerry scuttling after the other boys through a cluster of gorse bushes in search of ribbon-strewn arrows shot by the girls. In other stories, grandmother Win is trying to keep her granddaughter Plum safe from the strangest of strangers, little Iska worries and wonders why her mother seems like a changeling, and Verlyn Webbe shyly shows Linnet Lundren his disabled, feathered arm.

One of my favourite stories of the collection is The Swirling Cleft. Young Gad resents her newborn sibling and the shawl of mist that her step-mother Sil insists on wrapping around it, with almost devasting consequences. But Sil isn’t quite of this world; “In their house, there are warm smells, burned porridge and sheep’s wool and chimney soot, and there are cold smells, like Father’s rainy boots, and muddy flagstones and sodden thatch. Wherever Sil has been, though, there is a trace of seaweed in the air, of salt sea-fog and the insides of shells.”

With that glimpse, you can see that the author’s prose is gorgeous. Sometimes it’s simple and affecting, sometimes as plump and juicy as the fruit growing in the island’s hedgerows, sometimes it’s just downright dreamlike and delicious. But always, Gilbert keeps the reader rooted in a recognisable reality, so even the most magical of events feels tangible and true.

So hurray for Folk. And hurray for stepping out of your comfort zone and trying a genre you’re never normally attracted to. After all, you never know the delights you’ll find there.

Folk is published by Bloomsbury. Jacket design by David Mann, illustration copyright iStockphoto.

See also: A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham, reviewed by Graeme Fife

Tangleweed and Brine by Deirdre Sullivan, reviewed by Yvonne Coppard

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish, reviewed by Penny Dolan

Guest review by Miriam Halahmy - THE RELIVE BOX AND OTHER STORIES by T. C. Boyle

Miriam Halahmy writes novels for children and young adults. Her books have been published in the UK, America and other territories. Miriam’s books look at some of the most challenging issues of our time, dealing with immigration and asylum seekers currently and in the past, as well as homelessness, racism and family relationships. A new edition of her Carnegie nominated novel, Hidden  (Troika Books, 2018), has been adapted for the stage and will tour in the autumn. Her latest novel, Behind Closed Doors (Firefly Press, July) focuses on two fifteen year old girls on the verge of becoming homeless. Behind Closed Doors examines what it means to love and be loved, and how to make a life when there is no security at home. More on Miriam's website.

T.C. Boyle, an award winning American novelist and short story writer, is not widely known here in the UK. I was first introduced to his talents in a lengthy short story called Balto, set around a court case. A drunken father forces his twelve year old daughter to drive them home from school and she hits a cyclist. Will she lie for him under oath? Great dilemma!

This new collection, The Relive Box, shows off Boyle’s mastery of the form. As in poetry, not a word, a syllable or a line break are out of place. Each story is beautifully crafted with memorable phrases such as “the light making a cathedral of the street trees” and “dandruff like sleet in her hair.” Set now or in the near future, this is a prophetic, provoking, challenging and at times, downright scary collection; a call to arms, reflecting the current state of society and the rocky road we are heading down.

In the title story, every home has a Relive Box and Boyle shows us the terrifying potential of the digital age. The Box consumes every waking minute and most of the night. The children fight the adults for access and work has become an irritating distraction from the real purpose of life – time on the Relive Box. Read this story at your peril. It still lives with me weeks later.

Are We not Men?’ opens with a man’s arm being gripped in the locked down jaws of a deep red pitbull terrier. Have no fear; the animal (like many others in the story, including the ‘dogcat’) has been genetically modified. “She’s a Cherry Pit, germline immunity comes with the package,” says her owner, the eleven year old girl next door. Babies are equally modified, every nuance picked out in a catalogue for those who can pay. Height seems to be particularly valued for females. The child with the pitbull is six foot, two inches. How far will such modification go? In the street ‘crowparrots’ screech in the trees, commenting relentlessly; “Your mother…Up yours! ... f*** you.”

Other stories take current concerns and turn them on their head. In  She’s the Bomb terrorism is the focus but as a convenience tool. A student abrogates all responsibility for fellow human beings and invokes a fake terrorist scare twice for her own selfish purposes.

The Argentine Ant is a reflection on moving between cultures, a sting in the tail and the startling way creative thought can emerge from totally unexpected quarters.

We are drowning under a deluge of films, books, op eds, etc etc on the fate of humanity in the post-digital, post-genetic modification age. What if this has already happened? What will it look like? How will it affect us? Boyle considers these questions (almost with glee) and hits below the belt, sparing no feelings. Thoroughly recommended.

The Relive Box is published by Bloomsbury.

Guest review by Tim Bowler: THE WATERCRESS GIRL by H. E. Bates, short story collection

Tim Bowler has written over twenty books for teenagers and won fifteen awards, including the prestigious Carnegie Medal for River Boy. He has been described by the Sunday Telegraph as 'the master of the psychological thriller' and by the Independent as 'one of the truly individual voices in British teenage fiction'. His works include Midget, Shadows, Storm Catchers, Starseeker, Apocalypse, Frozen Fire, Bloodchild, Buried Thunder, Sea of Whispers and the Blade series. His most recent novels are Night Runner and Game Changer. His books have been translated into over thirty languages and have sold over a million copies worldwide.

I've always loved short stories, can't get enough of them, and I have collections of stories from all the big hitters of the genre plus every imaginable other kind of story ranging from the sublime to the execrable. It's hard to choose a favourite short story writer but H.E. Bates has to be near the top for me. I'm not mad on Bates's longer fiction and I can't stand the Pop Larkins but as a short story writer Bates holds me in a state of wonder. It's not just his evocations of rural England in the first half of the last century, his beautiful prose writing, his empathy with nature, his characterisation or even his humanity, apparent on every page, that set him apart for me. It's something else that he does with his stories, and I come back to the word 'wonder'. Where a Maupassant or a Saki might kill us with a twist, Bates's stories almost always turn on what Anthony Burgess called 'a small epiphany': a moment of revelation or transcendence at the spiritual apex of the story.

The Cowslip Field, the first story in Bates's collection entitled The Watercress Girl, is a good example. A small boy is being taken to the cowslip field by his guardian, a young woman called Pacey. He likes Pacey. She's kind and good humoured and she doesn't mind his leg-pulling about her country dialect. She patiently answers his questions, joshing with him about what ants do all day and why the sky doesn't fall down on us, and she doesn't even mind when he asks if she's got a young man. 'Oh, they're like plums on a tree,' she says. 'They all want to marry me.' We know that's not true. It's been made clear from the start, through the eyes of the boy, that Pacey is no looker. She's small, dumpy, has a mole on her cheek, and she wears outlandish glasses and a big felt hat. They make their way to the field, pick cowslips together, and thread them into chains, his much smaller than hers, then, for the first time, he notices that she has taken off her hat and has a huge wodge of hair rolled up 'like a heavy sausage'. He asks her to let it down so he can place a cowslip crown on her head. She doesn't want to but he persists. Let Bates take it from here…..

'She started to unpin the sausage at the back of her head, putting the black hairpins one by one into her mouth. Then slowly, like an unrolling blind, the massive coil of her hair fell down across her neck and shoulders and back, until it reached her waist. He had never seen hair so long, or so much of it, and he stared at it with wide eyes as it uncoiled itself, black and shining against the golden cowslip field.

'That's it, 'Pacey said, 'have a good stare.'

'Now I've got to put the crown on you,' he said.

He knelt by Pacey's lap and reached up, putting his cowslip chain on the top of her head. All the time he did this Pacey sat very still, staring towards the sun.

'Now yours,' he said.

He reached up, draping Pacey's own longer necklace across her hair and shoulders. The black hair made the cowslips shine more deeply golden than before and the flowers in turn brought out the lights in the hair. Pacey sat so still and staring as he did all this that he could not tell what she was thinking and suddenly, without asking, he reached up and took off her spectacles.

A strange, transformed woman he did not know, with groping blue eyes, a crown on her head and a necklace locking the dark mass of her hair, stared back at him….'

…….and there's the small epiphany, the moment of wonder: for the boy, for Pacey, for us. It only lasts a few seconds before Pacey remembers her modesty, mutters something, and restores her appearance to its former state. They joke a little more, then head for home, laughing, having fun, but somehow, in a subtle way, changed. And the story ends. H.E. Bates showing us how it's done.

The Watercress Girl is published by Bloomsbury.