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Cat Brushing by Jane Campbell

Ageing is often presented as an accumulation, of disease, of discomforts, of wrinkles, but it is really a process of dispossession, of rights, of respect, of desire, of all those things you once so casually owned and enjoyed.

So reflects the narrator of ‘Cat Brushing’, the titular story of Jane Campbell’s original, engaging and important collection, out today.

In ‘Cat Brushing’, first published in the London Review of Books in 2017, a retired teacher now living with her son and daughter-in-law feels a bond with her Siamese cat that is a kind of spiritual twinning: the cat is getting on in years now but still feisty, still independent-minded. She enjoys praise and comfort but not at the expense of her personal autonomy. When the cat’s presence in her life is threatened, the story’s narrator senses a further forced reduction in her own sense of self:

So in the absence of being able to please I try to be useful. And not disgusting. The cat got sick yesterday. She does sometimes. She hunts, she has always hunted, but is, I feel, less successful than she used to be. There it is again, the loss. She catches the slower prey, and eats bits of it and it may already be ill or diseased.

At the heart of each of the thirteen stories in Cat Brushing is an older woman. Some of these women, like the narrator of the title story, have been forced from their own environments into hostile domains. Others have so far escaped the attention of controlling relatives or concerned neighbours, determined to preserve their independence or to stake a new-found happiness on one final and possibly ill-advised throw of the dice.

The subject matter of these stories – ageing, dependency, loss, abuse, regret – is of the kind that will no doubt tempt some critics to describe this collection as ‘heartbreaking’. But while it is true that more than a couple of Campbell’s intensely private, thoughtful tales brought tears to my eyes, I am much more inclined to characterise her work as defiant, subversive, intelligent and singularly empowering. Even in their forgetfulness and physical frailty, Campbell’s women are garrulous, insightful and occasionally duplicitous. They never fail to retain agency over their own lives, even when that agency drives them, ultimately, to refuse what is on offer.

Stories such as ‘Susan and Miffy’ and ‘Lamia’ show older women in active possession of a vibrant sexuality. ‘The Scratch’ and ‘The Kiskadee’ touch on themes of abuse and control, but there are no neat answers, no tidy conclusions as Campbell opts for ambiguity rather than moral outrage. In ‘183 Minutes’, a story that might equally have been dreamed up by Ruth Rendell, the protagonist experiences a stark premonition of her own destruction yet still finds the hope of happiness trumping the fear of risk:

And she turned her face towards the window for she wanted to see if there was a reflection there of the woman she had suddenly become. But in the anonymity of the rushing fields she saw only her body dumped in an alley, at the bottom of a cliff, down a well, and then they flew under a bridge and against the momentary blackness she saw her face again.

Rather than taking refuge in the past, these characters are inhabitants of the modern world, equipped to deal with any challenges the future may hold. In ‘Lockdown Fantasms’, Campbell takes issue with the way older people have been further marginalised and forgotten during the COVID-19 pandemic, the key decisions about their ‘wellbeing’ taken by others. Social media and the metaverse in this story are magical, life-saving resources; in ‘Schopenhauer and I’ the reverse is true, with digital companionship used as a cover for surveillance and control.

How refreshing it is, to meet characters who are not careful about how they express themselves, who say what they think with relish and a crooked smile. The language of Cat Brushing, while spare and unadorned, is never simple. Literary allusions and philosophical experiment take their place alongside landscape writing that is richly imaginative and resonant, where a longing for lost realities is always tempered by mordant wit. The final story in the collection, ‘On Being Alone’, references Chekhov, and in its accretion of significant detail, its elegiac quality it has a distinctly Chekhovian melancholy about it:

As a child I already knew that I needed, craved, bathed myself in solitude. Being alone was my best place. As I grew through my teens I began to understand it better. I narrowed it down to a fear of belonging. Belonging to me meant losing something. not gaining anything. Losing individuality, losing, dare I say, specialness. I was a secretive and isolated child and I feared being identified with any other child as some people might fear the plague.

As so often in Chekhov, you don’t end up where you think you will. The past number of years have seen important conversations taking place not just about representation in literature but about who is doing the representing. While I would staunchly argue that one of the key skills of the fiction writer is imaginative empathy, that for the writer prepared to undertake the creative groundwork, no identity or set of experiences should be out of bounds, it seems equally important that in the portrayal of particular histories, experiences and worldviews we should amplify and pay attention to writers with first-hand knowledge of those situations and communities.

The increasing diversity of our prize shortlists and publishing schedules is both exciting and timely. How discouraging it is then, to see the matter of age so often excluded from these vital discussions, to see writers actively debarred from ‘first novel’ or ‘new writer’ awards or grant applications simply on the grounds of being over forty. On social media especially the increasing tendency is to tell older writers to shut up.

Age is not only the last taboo, it seems, but the last acceptable breeding ground for prejudice as well. For women especially, pressures relating to family and other gender-based expectations have often been contributory factors in narrowing down or closing off routes to publication. I have lost count of the number of post-war women writers I have come across in my reading and research whose careers have stalled or floundered, not through any lack of talent but through lack of opportunity or recognition.

All of which makes a collection like Cat Brushing doubly important. In their power and persuasiveness, their wily transgressions, their willingness to take risks, Jane Campbell’s stories reveal a reality that is relevant to all of us and too often ignored.

Forces and Loads

Earlier this summer I had the great joy and privilege of creating a piece of work based around an interview with the disaster risk engineer Josh Macabuag. The resulting story, ‘Forces and Loads’, is now live as part of the Inventive podcast initiative from the University of Salford, which places writers together in creative collaboration with workers in STEM.

I found Joshua’s interview and the insights it gave me into his work to be instantly inspiring, and I hope I have conveyed some sense of the power of his story through my own interpretation of it. ‘Forces and Loads’ runs in Episode 2 of the second series of Inventive, and you can listen to that episode here.

I am hugely grateful to Anna Scott-Brown and Adam Fowler of Overtone Productions for their help and expertise in making the experience so enjoyable and of course to Josh himself for allowing me an insight into his world. As I say in my own portion of the interview, I found enough material here for an entire novel and ‘Forces and Loads’ is a story I might well find myself revisiting in the future.

Sharke’s Choice #3: You Let Me In by Camilla Bruce

I had been hoping to read You Let Me In in time to include it in the series of posts on fairy literature and mythology I wrote to coincide with the publication of The Good Neighbours back in June. As often happens with my reading, the stars of time and ambition were not in alignment. However, now that I have read the novel I can see how beautifully it would have slotted into my list of favourite fairy fictions – and how oddly out of place it feels on this year’s list of Clarke Award submissions.

A year after their Aunt Cassandra goes missing, Janus and Penelope receive a curious letter, summoning them to an empty house and with instructions to read a manuscript they will find on the desk there. This manuscript is novelist Cassandra Tipp’s last will and testament – and the book you are holding. Cassandra’s life has not been easy. Previously put on trial for her husband’s murder, her role in the death of her doctor, not to mention several other close family members has also been the subject of gossip and speculation. Her late-blooming success as a romantic suspense novelist leaves us in no doubt of her way with words. But is her confession all it seems, or just another fairy tale? Janus and Penelope have a decision to make, and it looks like their involvement in their family’s strange history is far from over.

You Let Me In performs the extraordinary feat of being two novels slipped inside a single skin. On the surface, Bruce’s novel is a dark fairy tale, the story of a house in the woods besieged by the fair folk and the overflow of faery mythology into the mundane world. Beneath the shadow of the trees, however, lurks a tale of a different kind, a deeply troubling account of child abuse and family secrets, truths suppressed for so many years they have become unspeakable.

As with all the best fairy stories, Bruce leaves the matter open. Her writing is like the book itself – a wealth of lovely images and fine landscape writing that hides its thorns and snares beneath a wreath of flowers. To call this book delightful would be to do it a disservice – it’s far too weird for that. I can see why the publisher wanted to submit You Let Me In for the Clarke Award, because this is a novel that certainly deserves wider attention than it has attracted so far. But science fiction it is not, so I can equally understand why the jury did not select it for the shortlist. You Let Me In is exactly the kind of novel you might expect to do well at the Shirley Jackson Awards, and had I been on the jury, I could well have been agitating to swap out one of the other titles and place You Let Me In on that shortlist instead.

In any case, I am now eagerly awaiting Bruce’s second novel, the intriguingly titled Triflers Need Not Apply, based around the story of a nineteenth-century Norwegian-American serial killer I’d never heard of previously. Bruce has already shown herself to be a bold and original writer, and I’m sure this new book will leave readers equally haunted.

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In other news, a reminder that my new story collection The Art of Space Travel is now out in the world! I have been immensely gratified by the response it has received so far. As an overview of my work in short fiction to date, this book is special to me and interesting, I hope, for the reader. In the introduction I talk about how my idea of the short story has continued to shift and change, also how connections between stories – the idea of stories as episodes in the lives of characters, lives that may be revisited at any time – have always formed an important focus. I deliberately chose to skew the collection more towards science fiction than towards horror – for the simple reason that I would like to keep my options open for putting together a more horror-inflected collection at some later date. So hang on in there, horror fans – you are always in my heart.

I would also like to mention Out of the Ruins, an anthology of apocalypse and dying Earth stories edited by Preston Grassman and containing a brand new story by me. ‘A Storm in Kingstown’ is truly one of my favourites among my own stories, and might yet form part of a longer cycle because I fell in love with these characters and their world. The anthology boasts stories by China Mieville, Emily St John Mandel, Lavie Tidhar, Chip Delany and Ramsey Campbell among others, so why not stick it on your Hallowe’en reading list right now?

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While I’m here, I can’t resist sharing the marvellous and beautiful cover art for the French edition of The Dollmaker, which has been receiving some lovely reviews and notices across the channel.

The doll depicted is the work of dollmaker extraordinaire Laurence Ruet, whose work so resembles that of my own dear dollmaker Andrew Garvie that it has me catching my breath each time I see it. You can watch a stunning video of Laurence at work here. I honestly cannot think of a more fitting match between cover and contents. The Tristrams knock it out of the park yet again!

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Chris and I spent last week on the Isle of Skye, a superb experience that I am still digesting. It really is true that every Scottish island is different, with its own character and unique landscape. Skye is vast, a kingdom in itself, with the magnificent Cuillin mountains dominating the landscape. Meanwhile, I am making tentative progress with my next novel, embedding myself in that beginning part of the process which for me might more rightly be called a series of experiments, of false starts and new directions and many words discarded as I get to know my material and come to understand what I want to do with it. I think I’m almost ready to make a proper start now. I hope so, anyway!

Tiny Bookcase, Empty Tank

I recently had the pleasure and the privilege of recording an episode of The Tiny Bookcase podcast with the show’s wonderful and talented hosts, Nico Rogers and Ben Holroyd-Dell. Their approach, so far as I am aware, is unique: guests and hosts each write a short story especially for the podcast, based around a prompt selected (by the guest) from a choice of three. The first half of the podcast consists of readings of all three stories, followed by a discussion. In the second half of the podcast (which will go live next week) the hosts interview the guest about their life, work and any upcoming projects.

I found the whole experience highly enjoyable and one of the most interesting gigs I’ve yet taken part in, not least because the word limit for the story – 1,200 words – presented me with a challenge I had not attempted before. My stories tend to sprawl, rather, and so getting the job done in less than 2,000 words? Not easy. The prompt I chose was ‘Empty Tank’, feeling lucky because the story idea came to me more or less instantaneously. As you’ll discover if you listen to the podcast, the guys interpreted the title very differently – and that is the beauty of this kind of exercise. I have always maintained that one hundred writers sat in a room working from an identical first sentence will each produce a completely different piece of writing and here, in microcosm, is the proof of that.

For those of you who have read The Rift, I’m excited to tell you that ‘Empty Tank’ is a brand new creef story. For those who haven’t, welcome to their world!

Huge thanks to Ben and to Nico for inviting me on to the podcast, and for making me feel so welcome. I had a great time.

The Art of Space Travel – cover reveal!

The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories is a collection of my shorter fiction, bringing together stories written over the past two decades. None of these stories have been published together in the same place before. Some are being reprinted for the first time since they first appeared in my debut collection A Thread of Truth back in 2007. Others were originally published in small-circulation magazines and so have been hard to find. There is one brand new story, written in 2019 and appearing here in print for the first time.

The Art of Space Travel will be published on September 7th by the wonderful team at Titan Books. I shall be posting a full table of contents and more details closer to the release date, but in the meantime I have the pleasure of sharing with you the quite wonderful cover art, created for the collection by Julia Lloyd. For me, it sums up the mood and direction of the collection perfectly, and I could not be more thrilled by it. I am looking forward very much to sharing the stories themselves with you later in the year.

Island

At 15:45 tomorrow my story ‘Island’ will be the Short Works afternoon reading on Radio 4. The story will of course be available to listen to on the BBC Sounds app afterwards.

Radio 4 has been a mainstay of my cultural life since the age of ten, and seeing my name in the Radio Times feels like a significant moment, so I hope everyone who listens to it enjoys the story!

‘Island’ had something of an interesting genesis. The story’s main character, Janet, was the protagonist of an earlier version of my current work-in-progress. As many of you will know by now, I tend to discard vast tracts of material in the course of writing a novel, but as I have always stressed, no part of that process is a waste of time. Janet, and ‘Island’, are proof of that. It’s such a thrill to know she is around still, that her life on the page continues.

My huge thanks to producer Eilidh McCreadie, who commissioned ‘Island’, and to Alexandra Mathie for her beautiful reading.

Girls Against God #4: Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez and You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South

Reading these two story collections back-to-back presented an eerily similar aesthetic experience to my encounter with Geen and Ferrante last week, only in reverse. Both collections deal with social change, buried secrets and personal crisis. Both employ elements of the fantastic to secure their effects. Yet the manner of approach, the mode of attack could not be more different, with the internal temperature of these stories, above all, providing a fascinating contrast.

Enriquez’s stories (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) take place against the shifting, unstable backdrop of dictatorships past. In ‘The Intoxicated Years’ we follow a group of teenagers as they confront issues of identity, addiction and sexuality in the years following the fall of the Peron regime. The political repercussions and personal reckonings that preoccupy their parents are to their children a matter of intense dullness, of ‘yeah, whatevs’; set against the agonies of teenage angst, the adult world even in its moment of greatest precariousness feels tedious, played out, irrelevant. Only as they grow older do they begin to understand how no one can live surrounded by such a society and emerge unscathed.

Other stories come populated more literally with ghosts from the past and monsters of the present, and Enriquez’s manner of merging the bitterest social commentary with elements of horror – see ‘Under the Black Water’ for a Lovecraft-tinged death cult (this story carries strongly resounding echoes of Clive Barker’s ‘The Forbidden’ aka Candyman) and ‘The Neighbour’s Courtyard for a hideously unsettling variation on the zombie story – is brilliantly handled. The stories’ boldness in confronting issues of violence against women is, for me, the strongest, most vital aspect of this collection. Women here struggle not only against weak, bullying husbands and cowardly fathers, they have the whole machinery of systemic machismo to deal with as well:

How many times had a cop like this one denied to her face and against all evidence that he had murdered a poor teenager? Because that was what cops did in the southern slums, much more than protect people: they killed teenagers, sometimes out of cruelty, other times because the kids refused to ‘work’ for them – to steal for them or sell the drugs the police seized. Or for betraying them. The reasons for killing poor kids were many and despicable.

My personal favourites among these stories are those in which the horror is less overt, where the line between the uncanny and the everyday is most cunningly hidden. ‘An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt’ follows a tour guide as he entertains tourists with tales of the city’s most notorious murderers and serial killers, among whom the eponymous big-eared runt is most notorious of all, most especially because of the studied delight he seemed to take in the crimes he committed. As Pablo becomes ever more obsessed with the runt, the more the strain of his home life seems to tell on him. The story’s final lines are chilling, all the more so because they are inconclusive. The collection’s tour-de-force is ‘Spiderweb’, in which a young woman tied to a peevish and controlling husband goes on a day trip with him and her extravagantly charismatic and forthright cousin Natalia. Juan-Martin’s nagging and complaining is a constant irritation, and when their car breaks down on the return journey a reckoning seems at hand.

The landscape, atmosphere and tension of ‘Spiderweb’ are reminiscent of stories by Roberto Bolano in which the threat of violence, ever-present, hovers just out of sight. As soldiers of the regime torment a waitress at the neighbouring dining table, Juan-Martin’s unwavering sanctimoniousness threatens to push the threat over the edge towards calamity. Natalia though has her own ideas on how to deal with Martin. Once again, this story is all the more effective through leaving the reader to draw their own conclusion.

After the heat, dust and sweltering tension of Enriquez, I found the atmosphere of Mary South’s stories chilly at first; studied, beautifully turned and just a little too careful. I have seen other critics reference the SF TV series Black Mirror in their assessment of this debut collection, but the more I read of You Will Never Be Forgotten, the more this description seemed too pat, too obvious, and not wholly accurate. It is only really the first story, ‘Keith Prime’, that recalls Black Mirror, not to mention Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, and in spite of being (as are all the stories) beautifully written, it is the one I find least interesting, precisely because its minimalist, soft-sci-fi tropes have been rehearsed before. South makes overt use of science fiction again in ‘To Save the Universe, We Must Also Save Ourselves’, in which the messy real-life dramas of actor Faith Massey are set against the unswerving heroism of her screen incarnation, Dinara Gorun, captain of the spacecraft Audacity.

Fans of the movie Galaxy Quest will find themselves chuckling happily along, and the story leaves no doubt it is doing its own thing by placing Faith’s battle with entrenched sexism – the most indestructible monster she has faced both onscreen and off – front and centre. Far stronger though are those stories in which South turns away from convention and pushes hardest against the boundary between the disdainfully ironic and the overtly uncomfortable. ‘Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy’ starts out reading like a conventional ‘list’ story but gradually strays into territory that is both horrific and heart-shattering. ‘Architecture for Monsters’ follows a journalist-fan of the groundbreaking architect Helen Dannenforth as she works to uncover the inconvenient truths at the heart of a genius’s life and art. ‘The Promised Hostel’ is, in common parlance, something of a mind-fuck, also a great story, while the title piece ‘You Will Never Be Forgotten’, in which a content moderator at ‘the world’s most popular search engine’ seeks to confront her rapist, is equally bold and ambiguous.

If South’s collection seems to lack the visceral, palpable urgency of Enriquez’s, this could well be down to the fact that I read the two books so close together. The elegance of South’s writing, the smooth turns from the domestic-banal to the queasily unnerving, her unswerving examination of aspects of the way we all live now makes You Will Never Be Forgotten well worth seeking out, and leaves the reader in eager anticipation of what South will write next. As for Mariana Enriquez, I understand her next novel is shortly to appear in English translation and I cannot wait. In the meantime, I would urge you to take an hour’s break to watch this conversation between Enriquez and M. John Harrison at this year’s (unavoidably Zoom-based) Buenos Aires Literary Festival. The insights into their writing lives, literary process and aesthetic outlook are many, varied and scintillating. Well worth your time.

Still Worlds Turning

Still Worlds Turning is an anthology of new contemporary short fiction edited by Emma Warnock and published by No Alibis Press, an independent imprint run from a bookshop of the same name in Belfast. This was one of the books I decided to take with me to read at Worldcon, due to its firm (though by no means exclusive) focus on Irish writers.

Anthologies are strange beasts. At their best, they are genuinely eye-opening. At their worst, they are shapeless, uneven in quality and, occasionally, pointless. As with single-author collections, my taste in anthologies is very much for those that have a coherence about them, not necessarily in terms of theme (themed anthologies can quickly lose their appeal) but in terms of approach. They should have something to say, in other words – a sense of direction, a message to communicate about the state of fiction now.

Happily, Still Worlds Turning has all the radicalism and cohesion you could possibly wish for. Reading it is like being a fly on the wall at a gathering of talent so fresh and so furious it is almost gladiatorial.

Some of the writers included – Eley Williams, Joanna Walsh, Wendy Erskine, Sam Thompson, Jan Carson, Lucy Caldwell – were already familiar to me, the others new names. The quality was consistent throughout and while the the editor has deliberately shied away from imposing any overarching theme on Still Worlds Turning, what these stories have in common is a rawness and intensity of approach, a willingness to wrestle with the stuff of language. In the hands of these writers, the short story is cast not as a precious jewel, refined and entire unto itself, but as a living drama constantly evolving before our eyes. There is humour here, and pathos, where humour is a defining feature of resilience.

And for those who are into theme, it is there to be found. No doubt it was my own gothic sensibilities that led me to discern in this anthology a through-thread of the uncanny, not just in Sam Thompson’s appropriately named ‘Seafront Gothic’, but also in Lucy Caldwell’s disturbing and eerie ‘Night Waking’, Daniel Hickey’s brilliant and brutal – and very funny – ‘The Longford Chronicle’ (think/dream Boris Johnson meets The Hunger Games), Laura-Blaise McDowall’s strange and lovely ‘Balloon Animals’, and Mandy Taggart’s poignantly Faustian ‘Burn’.

There are stories here that I found challenging, not so much in the way they are written but in the vision they present. Judyth Emanuel’s ‘Tw ink le’, Jan Carson’s ‘The World Ending in Fire’, Dawn Watson’s ‘The Seaview Hundred and Fifty-Two’ and Lauren Foley’s ‘Molly & Jack at the Seaside’ in particular are viscerally raw snapshots of life at the margins but I count this very much as a plus because these are stories that need to be heard. I would point readers towards Lauren Foley’s account of Molly’s journey to publication for a sobering insight into how difficult it can be – still – to find publishers willing to take the risk with uncomfortable material, even when the editors themselves profess admiration for the work.

No Alibis and Emma Warnock should be commended for taking that risk. Still Worlds Turning deserves notice as a key reference point for what is happening in fiction right now. Here is a generation of writers delving deep into issues of community, poverty, sexuality and trauma whose work does not just feel timely, it feels urgent. Above all, these are stories that demonstrate the power and the beauty of language, in which the gaps in language say almost as much as the words themselves, in which form is as vital as content. Read and learn.

Episodes

Chris’s new book Episodes is published today in hardback and ebook. The cover art is striking and extremely handsome.

It’s billed as a short story collection, but this book, it seems to me, is so much more than that. Carefully curated, it presents a valuable and fascinating overview of Chris’s work to date. Here you will find stories from the early part of his career, one of which, ‘The Invisible Men’, has only previously been available as part of the special reissue of Chris’s first collection, Real Time World. What shocks me most about this fifty-year-old story now is how prescient it feels.

Here you will find a novella, The Ament, which was first published in a somewhat obscure anthology in the 1980s and has not been seen since – until now. It’s a powerful piece of work, replete with Priestian themes (identity, reality, twins) and an absolute must-read for fans of The Glamour and The Prestige.

Chris often insists that he doesn’t write horror, yet in I, Haruspex, a novella from the turn of the millennium that has been equally difficult to access until today, you will discover one of the most unnerving works of gothic fiction you have ever read, all twisted up inside a bizarre and compelling story of time travel and WW2 espionage.

Palely Loitering and An Infinite Summer, both key works from the Priest canon and nominated for multiple awards, are hereby made available also for the first time in some years.

The table of contents speaks for itself. What makes Episodes even more special and so much more than just a collection is Chris’s own personal commentary, presented in the form of an introduction as well as individual forewords and afterwords to each of the texts. The story of the stories, in other words, and an important contribution to the overarching and constantly updating history of British science fiction.

This is a book to be savoured and treasured. More even than that, it is a book to challenge and inspire.

The Gift of Angels: an introduction

I have a new story out in the November issue of Clarkesworld magazine. You can read it here.

‘The Gift of Angels: an introduction’ was drafted in Paris last year, during my residency at Les Recollets. I finished the draft just three days prior to my departure – you could say the novelette takes place in real time. My return to Scotland was also an immediate return to work on the final draft of The Dollmaker and the then-current draft of the novel I am working on now, and so it was not until the end of this summer that I was able to complete the story and submit it.

Some readers might notice that ‘The Gift of Angels’ is a sequel, of sorts, to my 2016 story ‘The Art of Space Travel’, though the two works function entirely independently of one another.  ‘Gift’ brings together elements of memoir, criticism and complete fiction in a way I had not quite dared to attempt before but that is coming increasingly to preoccupy me. I wouldn’t normally say this, but I love this story. I hope readers will enjoy discovering it.

My huge thanks to Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld for being open to the story’s possibilities, and to my French publishers and the wonderful people at La Maison de la Poesie and Les Recollets, to whom ‘The Gift of Angels’ is dedicated.

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