Hitting Trees with Sticks

This is award-winning Rogers' first short story collection, and each of the twenty tales is an absorbing little novel in miniature. We feel the heat and tension in an African compound for rescued women along with the well-intentioned but naive do-gooder in 'Red enters the eye'. 'The Ghost in the Corner' shows divisions aren't just a matter of skin colour, and what connects us goes deeper. It muses, too, in a magic realism way, on the random forces that direct our lives.

Rogers has a way with titles. 'Morphogenesis' time shifts the reader, depositing him in the innocent and earnest consciousness of Alan Turing, a victim in a cold society. 'The law will not allow him to be the man his own cells tell him he is.'

Rogers' writing style is down to earth yet lyrical; she sees the profound in the ordinary. She's alert to scientific discovery, and communication technology runs as a motif through the collection, as a way to understanding Stevie's death ('up there with all of that stuff he likes, the radio waves and phone signals and satellites') to the chaotic soundscape of human activity.  'Outside the rain makes a hiss like we're caught in a radio frequency where nothing is being broadcast.' White noise. That's something this collection will never be accused of.