She has never recovered from the deaths of her three grown children: Ethel, Kathleen and, finally, senselessly, Murray, two months after Kathleen. Marjorie still keeps one of Kathleen’s Sunday handkerchiefs, spotted with her blood.Īs for their mother, Cecelia Maud, it is true what people say. And Kathleen, just two years later, only twenty-two. Marjorie – or Marjorie Genevieve as her father always called her – sleeps in what the family still call ‘Ethel’s room’, though it has been thirteen years since Ethel was taken from them by TB. Below her bedroom window, the drifts rise up in frozen waves of white – even the sudden gusts and eddies of wind cannot disturb those peaks – while overhead, the warmth of the sun is so reluctant in its offerings, so meagre, you’d not be alone if you failed to notice the coming of the first thaw.Ībove her room, a sheet of ice on the eaves gives way, smashing like a mirror on to the porch roof, but everyone in the house sleeps on. Every bare branch, every dead leaf is sheathed in ice, like a fossil from another age, an antediluvian dream of blossom and green canopies. Outside, the world is glassy the trees on Pleasant Street, glazed with winter. The smoky light of a March sunrise is seeping through the winter drapes. Wisdom after the event is cheap indeed – but go back. Read moreĪcknowledgements The Thaw For Marjorie Genevieve Written with vigorous intelligence and delicate insight, this collection captures the surprising joys, small tragedies and profound truths of existence. Precise, playful and evocative, these exquisitely crafted stories explore memory, the media and mortality, unfolding at the line between reality and fiction. And at Charleston, Angelica Garnett, child of the Bloomsbury Group, is overcome by the past, all the beloved ghosts that spring to life before her eyes.

On a trip to Brighton, reluctant jihadists face the ultimate spiritual test. In an ancient Yorkshire churchyard, the author visits Sylvia Plath's grave and makes an unexpected connection across time. A cardiac specialist lingers on the edge of consciousness as he awaits a new heart – and is transported to an attic room half a century ago.

A teenager searches for his lover on a charged summer evening in 2011, as around him London erupts in anger.

In 1920s Nova Scotia, as winter begins to thaw, a woman emerges from mourning and wears a new fur coat to a dance that will change everything.

Hovering on the border of life and death, these stories form a ground-shifting collection, taking us into history, literature and the hidden lives of iconic figures. SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARDSĪcutely observed, evocative collection of short stories from the Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of Unexploded, blending fiction, biography and memoir

The Beloved by Alison Rattle