Sunstroke

This is a deftly assembled collection of short stories about the everyday flow of human lives, and unexpected moments that can shift those lives off (or back on) course.

It’s a collection that works very well as a whole, successfully linking a lonely teenage girl to a physics teacher, and frustrated mothers to a lovestruck student. As the title implies, a majority of the stories take place on holiday, outside comfortable and familiar patterns, providing the space for excitement, danger, and transformation.

There are some standout stories, those in which secret desires or fantasised-about transgressions threaten to disrupt the easy rhythm of daily life: the physics teacher pursues the woman whose subtle flirtations awoke adult desires in him as a thirteen-year-old boy; the married mother kisses another man in darkness on a country walk. The restlessness and nervous anticipation that ripple beneath the surface are rewarded in these stories with conclusions that aren’t by any means final, but open out into unknowable – and possibly altered – futures.

By contrast, those stories that are more reflective are also less engaging, as if we were reading the analysis rather than the story itself. Yet even here there’s much to enjoy, as women look back over their lives and consider their families, their friends, and their lovers. In these stories we gain the benefit of hindsight, of knowing the consequences of each action taken, or not taken – although the future lies open here, too, with all its uncertain potential.  

Navigating the passage of time with ease, shifting back and forth from the 1960s to the present day, these stories unite the past and the present, the child and the adult, through their shared fears and desires – and the eternal promise of change.