I don’t normally do this year summation thing before Christmas (it offends my sensibilities to do such a thing before the full time span has elapsed) but in this case I don’t think I’ll be adding to the total before New Year.

I seem to have read 25 Scottish books so far this year (the definition of Scottish is loose;) 13 by women and 12 by men. Four were Science Fiction, Fantasy or Fable, two collections of shorter fiction, one was poetry and one was a fictionalised memoir. The links below are to my reviews of those books.

World Out of Mind by J T McIntosh

News of the Dead by James Robertson 

The Little Snake by A L Kennedy 

Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides by Kevin MacNeil

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

The Second Cut by Louise Welsh

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan

Solution Three by Naomi Mitchison

Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark

Dust on the Paw by Robin Jenkins

The Disorderly Knights by Dorothy Dunnett

Queen of Clouds by Neil Williamson

Kitchenly 434 by Alan Warner

An Apple From a Tree by Margaret Elphinstone

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

Squeaky Clean by Callum McSorley

The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark

The Other Side of Stone by Linda Cracknell

To the Dogs by Louise Welsh

The Changeling by Robin Jenkins

Aunt Bel by Guy McCrone

Conquest by Nina Allan

Borges and Me by Jay Parini  

The Silver Bough by Neil Gunn  (review to be posted here soon.)

The Women’s Press, 1991, 267 p.

This is a collection of Elphinstone’s short prose works. As usual with Elphinstone the writing is accomplished.

The Green Man. An Art teacher with some romantic disappointments and reasonably unsuccessful exhibitions behind her is walking the disused Dumfries to Stranraer railway line when she comes across an unusual dome-shaped green tent at the lochside near Lochskerrow Halt. Its occupant is a green man, possibly from an alien planet (his tent is not a spaceship, but his culture is other-worldly) who seems able to read her thoughts. Nevertheless their conversation is at cross purposes and frustrating. However, she does not feel threatened by him and agrees to return the next day. She finds herself attracted to him and the inevitable happens. Yet she doesn’t go back again. Her experience feeds into her artwork and her paintings become desirable. When the Loch Skerrow location is identified by one viewer she realises she has put the green man in danger.

Islands of Sheep. A middle-aged academic who has seemingly been unable to sustain relationships with the various women in his life has moved into a bungalow on the Cambridgeshire fens with an ancient mulberry tree in the garden and a view towards a low ridge that was once an island. He takes in as a tenant a young attractive woman psychologist, whom he has difficulty in understanding. As the tale comes towards its end he experiences hallucinations, symptoms of a nervous breakdown.

Conditions of Employment delves into the Matter of Britain. A relatively young jobless woman despairing at her lot in life throws rocks into a stream in her anguish. A few days later she sees a post as a Well Guardian advertised at her local Job Centre. She goes along to the unusual location for the interview. As Well Guardian she finds herself giving advice to people with minor skin complaints or other medical requirements. She also encounters the Watcher of the Sleepers who wants to know if it is the time of danger enough to wake those asleep under Cairnsmore Hill.

The Cold Well features the permanent Guardian of the Well, Oddny, who, at her antlered folkloric counterpart’s request, travels across a stretch of sea to try to undo the source of the sickness affecting the local deer. Reading between the lines, that source is Sellafield.

An Apple From a Tree. The events of this are narrated by a woman to her lover some months after they supposedly took place.  She was in a stand of beech trees in the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh when an apple fell on her. Biting into it she was suddenly transported to a grassy plain where stood a naked woman, who (later) gives her name as Nisola. Shortly her male companion arrived. Nisola was as discomfited by our narrator – especially her clothes – as she was herself. After some confused discussion Nisola bit the apple and they were transported to Edinburgh. Cue toing and froing trying to ameliorate Nisola’s nakedness, before they work out a solution that will serve both. There are irresistible echoes here of the tale of Adam and Eve.

A Life of Glory is narrated by a disembodied consciousness roaming the universe and looking down on the affair of a couple – one from Edinburgh the other from Colorado – with whom the narrator eventually becomes intimately entangled.

Pedant’s corner:- “Aren’t I allowed to have any secrets?” (She’s Scottish; she would say ‘Amn’t I?’) “would have been mowed smooth” (would have been mown smooth,) “with him arm around (with his arm around,) an unindented new paragraph, “supplicants” (previously the spelling suppliant had been used,) almanack (usually spelled ‘almanac’,) seelings (context suggests ‘seedlings’.) Plus points for die as the singular of dice.

Harvill Secker, 2019, 234 p, including 2p Contents and 2 p Acknowledgements.

This is Logan’s latest solo collection of stories, her first, The Rental Heart and other fairytales, I reviewed here. I have also read her novels The Gracekeepers and The Gloaming.

The stories here are chiefly burdened with overly long titles eg Birds Fell From the Sky and Each One Spoke in Your Voice or We Can Make Something Between the Mushrooms and the Snow. As the title implies the subject matter tends to be dark. On the whole the collection is tinged with magic realism or outright fantasy and often tips over into horror.

The stories are prefaced and interspersed with what at first appear to be authorial interjections about the circumstances of writing the book and the author’s private life but these short passages soon evolve into what is obviously as much of a fiction as the stories which surround and envelop them.

The book is divided into three sections: The House, The Child and The Past. The first story in each is composed of four short pieces labelled respectively First Fear, Second Fear, Third Fear, and Fourth Fear but most of the stories deal with fear of one sort or another. These fears tend to be female concerns: childbirth and the things attendant on it (apprehensions about what is gestating, what has appeared, is the child safe and well? Am I a good enough mother?) abduction, rape, domestic restriction. One, about seeing a Punch and Judy Show and recognising its hideousness, is told almost entirely by way of footnotes. Another takes the form of a questionnaire – including its rubric. Another alludes to the story of Snow White but takes it in an even darker direction.

From my experience of her writing so far (see links above) Logan presents herself best, as here, at short story length.

Pedant’s corner:- “and fold it on itself” (‘fold in on itself’ makes more sense,) “for heaven’s sakes” (is USian. Britons say ‘for heaven’s sake’,) “into his screeching maw” (stomachs don’t shriek,) “aren’t I?” (Scots say ‘amn’t I?)

Doubleday, 1989, 235 p.

This is a collection of four pieces of Crowley’s shorter fiction.

The Nightingale Sings at Night is a fable outlining a creation myth garnished with a touch of Just So story. It tells how Boy and Girl (later to become Man and Woman) were the first to name things in the world made by Dame Kind in times when the Moon could talk, and did so slyly. And it tells us why the nightingale, who only ever had this one idea, came to sing only at night.

As its title might suggest, Great Work of Time is a tale of time travel, hinging on whether – or not – Cecil Rhodes was assassinated at his house Groote Schuur, in 1893. A society calling itself the Otherhood was set up after a provision in his will in order to preserve the Empire to which he was so attached. The story starts with Caspar Last in 1983 inventing a method of time travel which involves what our narrator (as in Heinlein’s “‘-All You Zombies-‘” despite superficial appearances, there is really only one) calls orthogonal logic – past and present do not lie before and behind the present but at right angles to it. Yet this story could start anywhere – or anywhen – and is mainly concerned with the life of Denys Winterset, the President pro tem of the Otherhood (all its presidents are pro tem) who is contacted in Khartoum on a journey north on the Cape to Cairo railway, enticed into the Otherhood and given the job of assassinating Rhodes. In the Otherhood’s timeline the Empire was prolonged, the Great War wasn’t so great since it ended in 1915 with the Treaty of Monaco and as a consequence the Holocaust never happened. The story roams hither and thither across the Empire’s history including to time’s end in a forest in the sea. The writing here is wonderful and Crowley’s altered worlds are enticing.

In Blue is a story set, post Revolution, in a kind of eutopia based on coincidence magnitude calculations and the act-field theory (which predicts the occurrence, within any given parameters of the field, of coincidences of a certain magnitude.) Whatever you do, whatever comes about in the whole act field, is by definition what act-field theory predicts. All possible disproofs were themselves provable parts of act-field theory as was everything else. Our protagonist, Hare, meets a woman who thinks there is no such thing as act-field theory but that as long as everybody else believes in it, then it does work. A beautiful expression of the type of double-think which exists in authoritarian societies.

Novelty relates the struggle of a writer to come to terms with his theme, the contrary pull people feel between Novelty and Security

Pedant’s corner:- “A theatrical costumer” (costumier,) “the place where the Nile had its origin” (the text implies this origin is the Victoria Falls, which are on the Zambezi, not the Nile,) railroad (I know it was written by a USian and for a USian publication but Brits don’t use that word. It’s a railway. Similarly we had ‘drapes’ for ‘curtains’,) the American civil war” (it’s a proper noun so, American Civil War,) “the year of grace IV Elizabeth II” (I’m not sure why that ‘IV’ is there – unless it’s to denote the fourth year of the reign,) “I apologise for the hugger-mugger” (hugger-mugger is used here in the sense of secrecy, clandestine, not the usual one of close-packed, disorderly confusion,) question marks omitted from three pieces of direct speech which were questions, “the probability of any two snowflakes’ being exactly alike” (that apostrophe after snowflakes is surely not needed.)

Vintage, 2014, 253 p.

Like all Burnside’s prose this collection is exquisitely written. The best word to describe the effect he produces is, perhaps, liminal. The places where his stories are set are familiar, recognisable as the real world, but also strange, somewhat askew.

Something Like Happy is the tale of two siblings, Stan and Arthur McKechnie, as told by Fiona the sister of Stan’s girl-friend, Marie. The McKechnies are infamous in the town (a source of friction between Marie and her parents) but Arthur, whom Fiona only knows of through her work at the bank, is the quiet one of the family with his own strange ways. Occasionally he borrows stuff from Stan without permission.

Slut’s Hair is apparently the name for the stuff which gathers in dark corners where nobody has cleaned. Here a woman with an overbearing husband who has just removed one of her teeth with pliers since the dentist will be too expensive discovers some when she thinks it is a mouse. Her husband will not be pleased either way.

Peach Melba is the delicacy prepared for the narrator in his youth by the mysterious female owner of the House of Ice-Cream on the day that has haunted him for the rest of his life.

Sunburn is narrated by a man who, possibly due to an incident in his adolescence, cannot help every year on the first day of summer going out into the sun and falling asleep.

The title of Perfect and Private Things is taken from a poem ‘The Smiles of the Bathers’ by Walden Kees. The tale is of a not happily married woman lecturer, “She had learned long ago that matrimony was not so much the occasion of romantic desire as its final, and inescapable, cure,” whose annual ritual of sending flowers anonymously to one of her students is, this year, tainted by the presence in the pub where she has a drink after visiting the florist of a group of students.

Godwit relates how Jamie’s mate Fat Stan, goes off the rails after Jamie prefers to spend time with a girl rather than him, which is an extremely reductive description of a thoughtful, finely wrought story.

The Bell-Ringer is narrated by another woman in a becalmed marriage. From a Slovakian background (with family in unmarked graves, presumably Holocaust victims) she lives in her husband’s family home and finds it unsettling, imagining the ears of listeners from times past. Her unease with life is assuaged a little by taking up bell-ringing at the local church but crystallises when her sister-in-law reveals she is having an affair.

The Deer Larder updates the ghost/fairy story for the internet age. The narrator suffers from iritis and after a day of treatment receives an email – apparently by mistake – from someone called Martin trying to entice a former lover back. Its mention of Maupassant bypasses him at first but subsequent emails draw him into wondering if he is being tantalised by an author relating Martin’s experiences. The emails stop but the story doesn’t.

The Cold Outside is what a man who has just had a diagnosis of terminal cancer and regretting the distance (physical and emotional) between his wife and his daughter feels he has more in common with than his everyday life.

In A Winter’s Tale a young lad left in temporary charge of a junk shop one afternoon brightens the place up with Christmas decorations before being rudely interrupted.

Lost Someone describes an incident from earlier story Godwit from another viewpoint. The incident, when it comes, is bewildering to the narrator but not the reader.

In Roccolo a woman on the Amalfi coast makes it her project every year to initiate a young boy holidaying in her Father’s villa complex into her strange activities with birds in the roccolo.

The Future of Snow features a policeman looking out for a wandering man whose wife died in the snow a couple of Christmases ago. She apparently mistook the day of a clandestine meeting with the policeman and slipped and fell off the path.

Pedant’s corner:- Mathers’ (Mathers’s,) semester (the British usage is term,) staunch (stanch.)

Edited by Edward Ferman Mercury Press

In this issue the normal Book Review column is missing but Baird Searles reviews various films with an SF/fantasy connection. In his SCIENCE: But How? Piece, Isaac Asimov discusses the need, as he saw it, for birth control since the imperative to have children which obtained in history’s tribal societies no longer pertains in the modern age. As a result he mentions various non-harmful but also noon-child -producing sexual practices not normally to be found in the pages of a mid-twentieth century SF magazine.
There is also a cartoon by Gahan Wilson

In the fiction:-
The Mayday by Keith Roberts is one of his “Anita” stories. Here his perky witch is called through her crystal ball to rescue a young mermaid (she calls them Jennifers) captured by humans and kept in a cage. Roberts’s writing is always well executed with precise descriptions and well observed human behaviours.
Starting From Scratch by Robert Sheckley reminded me a little bit of Brian Aldiss’s Heresies of the Huge God except the premise is more or less reversed. A man is disturbed from his dream by a call for help from a creature whose world has been disturbed by a huge incursion from the sky.
Reading The Throne and the Usurper by Christopher Anvil it’s as if the New Wave of the 1960s never happened. The writing is perfunctory and heavy with exposition, the viewpoint character has it all too easy. The plot is about the megalomania of a telepath.
Where The Misfortune Cookie by Charles E Fritch is going to end up becomes obvious, if not from the title then from when the narrator’s first fortune cookie message comes true. The premise is followed logically but to modern readers the story usage (twice) of the word “coolie” jars more than a little.
With Time Dog by Richard A Lupoff, again the title gives the game away somewhat and again the narration is of its time. A sick child, Janet, blames a mysteriously appearing and disappearing dog she calls Soapy for taking her inhaler away. As her condition slowly worsens, Soapy brings her an advanced toy, another dog performs similar tricks and a obviously wrongly (to Janet’s father) dated comic book is left, plus an apparently identical inhaler.
In a reprint of The Venus of Ille by Prosper Mérimée, translated from the French by Francis B Shaffer, a traveller in southern France encounters a recently unearthed statue which may be of Roman origin. The statue it seems is capable of independent action. Unfortunately, the translation uses a number of US colloquialisms at odds with both the tone of the piece and its setting.
Alpha Bets by Sonya Dorman is one of the author’s stories featuring Roxy Rimidon of the Planet Patrol. The main focus is on a kind of future competitive Games with dangerous elements. Roxy organises the replacement of her brother’s injured team mate by a man from off-planet.

Pedant’s corner:- Lucas’ (Lucas’s,) Roberts’ (x 4 Roberts’s,) an unnecessarily italicised “Gafonel,” an opened parenthesis that is never closed, “social pressure were in favour” (either, ‘pressures’, or, ‘was in favour’,) sandas (sandals.)

Canongate, 2004, 173 p.

This is a fine collection of short stories by the author, whose novels Buddha Da, Gone Are the Leaves and Being Emily I enjoyed immensely. As a glance at the titles shows, most of the stories here are written in very broad Glasgow dialect.

Title story Hieroglyphics is narrated by Mary, a schoolgirl who cannot read nor write because all she sees is the letters “diddlin aboot.” Inspired by her knowledge of Egyptians her class studied in Primary School she can however express herself using pictograms.
Clare, the narrator of All That Glisters, is also a schoolgirl. Her father is bedridden from asbestosis but she brightens his life with a Christmas card she made for him using glitter pens. The ending is bitter sweet.
The Ice Horse is a rocking horse kept in the cold shed at Anna’s grandfather’s home. Her dearest wish is to look into its un-ice-covered eyes.
Virtual Pals is in the form of an exchange of emails between Siobhan and Irina. The latter was supposed to live in Shetland but her replies are emailed from Jupiter. This gives Donovan the opportunity to comment on the mores of young teenage life in Glasgow.
In Dear Santa another young girl who feels her younger sister is her parents’ favourite swithers about asking Santa for what she really wants for Christmas.
Wanny the Lassies is the tale of a schoolgirl causing problems for her male teacher through an essay indicating he had inappropriate relations with her.
A Chitterin Bite draws a parallel between the betrayal of a young girl by the friend she goes swimming with who drops her by taking up with a boy, to her later affair with a married man.
Me and the Babbie tells of the intense bond a mother feels with her new-born son.
In Away in a Manger a mother and her child go to see the Christmas Lights in Glasgow’s George Square. Both are shocked to see a homeless man in the background of the nativity tableau.
The Doll’s House her father made for her is being decorated by a mother for her son.
While out Brambling a woman and her child get lost.
A mature student takes some children for drama classes in The Workshop. It brings her into close contact with their male teacher.
Marking Time tells of a South European immigrant to Glasgow who remembers his time sweeping the beach of his home town when news of a bequest reaches him.
A Ringin Frost is the story of a woman whose husband is the only person who can warm her cold heart.
In A Change of Hert a woman searches for the reason why her husband’s preferences have changed after his heart transplant.
Dindy is told in short paragraphs illustrating fragments of memory.
Loast is narrated by an unmarried woman losing in old age her memory for words.
Zimmerobics is the bright idea of a young woman to lighten the existence of people in an old folks’ home.

Pedant’s corner:- “chitterin bite” (usually spelled chittery bite,) “aware that this eyes scan the room” (his eyes,) “painted the it coral pink” (no ‘the’ needed,) “round the the cars” (has a ‘the’ too many.)

Penguin, 1970, 166 p.

This is a collection (her first) of the author’s short fiction. The stories date from the 1960s.

The object of the affections of the narrator of the title story tells her at the start that he doesn’t intend “a mean and squalid little affair” with her, that instead they would become friends, but a mean and squalid little affair is what it turns out to be.

An Outing describes another affair, this time unconsummated, between a woman only ever referred to as Mrs Farley, who is unhappy with her husband. The other man is someone she had seen casually at bus stops but suddenly notices has been missing. When he turns up again (after being ill) they realise their affection for each other.

The Rug was delivered, with no clue from whom, to the narrator’s childhood home and immediately became her mother’s pride and joy. Her feckless father allowed himself to be thought of as the agent of its arrival through one of his many acquaintances; but of course it wasn’t.

The Mouth of the Cave is a tale of frustrated hope. A woman on a walk to a nearby village sees another rise from the ground and begin to dress. Thereafter she waits for the other to turn up at her house for dinner, only to be disappointed. She avoids that route from then on.

How to Grow a Wisteria has nothing to do with gardening. Rather it is about slowly coming to terms with yourself and the opportunities lost while you are doing so.

In Irish Revel a seventeen-year-old Irish farm girl goes to her first party at the hotel in the nearby town. It’s a disappointing affair all round.

Cords is the tale of an Irish farm-wife visiting her daughter Claire in London, a daughter whose ways she finds far too modern, but who cannot be her true self while her mother is there. The visit paradoxically moves them apart but also closer.

Paradise is set in a Mediterranean resort where a woman finds herself in a doomed attempt to fit in with the set of acquaintances of her relatively new – and older – lover. He has set her the task of learning to swim while there. She eventually succeeds but the vacuousness of it all starts to get to her.

Pedant’s corner:- ecstacies (ecstasies,) saccharine (not sickly sweet; it was the sweetener, sacharrin,) cow lats (cow pats makes more sense,) “her breathe” (breath,) connexion (connection,) instuctor (instructor,) “would not leave go of her”(is this an Irish formulation? ‘Would not let go of her’ sounds far more natural to me,) light-house (lighthouse.)

Secker & Warburg, 1998, 252 p, including ii p Contents.

This is a collection of Kelman’s short stories. Most contain West of Scotland phrases and dialogue. Two are written in absolutely standard English (apart from the contractions for was not, did not, could not etc – which appear without apostrophes throughout the book.) I Was Asking a Question Too concerns a man who notes down snippets he thinks are important from the books he reads, and Some thoughts that morning, the random musings of a commuter on the Glasgow Underground heading east from Hillhead to Kelvingrove.

The other stories feature; a man good at climbing buildings, rones and roofs; another, fond of books, who is happy at the changes garden work has made in his physique; workplace gripes and arguments; a married man scaring his family by contemplating swimming over a nuclear submarine; a conversation in a Job Centre queue; a young father imagining what it would have been like to have worked as a fur trapper; a man going through stages of despair and disorganisation after his woman has left him; another at odds with his wife as they browse a charity shop; one more finding himself reminiscing about his schooldays as he nurses his drinks in a pub while waiting for his wife to turn up; another tries to dodge being seen as he appears to be drowning a cat; another muses on how relationships turn sour, someone thinks about how viscous his blood is when he cuts himself preparing vegetables; a divorcee of five years is annoyed when his mate uses him as cover for cheating on his wife; a man of no fixed abode rambles the south coast and remembers his past life; a couple banter about her woman’s intuition; a young man tries to fathom out his girlfriend; a middle-aged insomniac thinks things could be worse.

In the longest story, Comic Cuts, a group of Scottish men gathered in someone’s house in London after a night in the pub shoot the breeze while waiting for soup that never arrives. Their conversation is full of digressions, interruptions and non-sequiturs, and not without intellectual hi-jinks.

Reminiscing about the times when Scotland regularly beat the English at football gives us the thought, “Funny thing but we were a crabbit bunch of bastards at the same time. Nowadays every cunt gubs us and we’re fucking cheery about it. Maybe if we stopped being so fucking cheery we’d start winning again. The tartan army and aw that crap, we used to be the worst hooligans of the fucking lot. See this stuff about good-natured fans? it’s a load of shite.”

One of the protagonists is of the opinion, “Men are more romantic than women of course that goes without saying,” but goes on to say, “It’s just how I am, a demonstrative person, a most untypical Scottish male.”

Pedant’s corner:- “See this stuff about good-natured fans? it’s a load of shite.” (See this stuff about good-natured fans? It’s a load of shite.”) “in the off chance” (on the off chance,) bolls, (as in ‘testicles’; I don’t see the need to change the spelling from balls,) a tendency to render proper nouns in the lower case, jiggerey-pokery (usually spelled jiggery-pokery,) “a piece on jam” (I’ve always understood the phrase to be ‘a piece and jam’,) “highjack a dialogue” (why not hijack?) “If you think ought of severity” (aught of severity,) a missing full stop.

Influx Press, 2017, 171 p.

The first impression on reading this collection of short stories is that Williams has an abiding interest in words – see two of the story titles, not to mention aphaeresis* and apocope. That is all to the good, authors ought to have such an interest. So here we find Williams using stark and spectrum as verbs, giving us an unusual meaning for the word ‘boggling’ to do with the movements of rat’s eyes and also the pleasing coinage Timbucktootle. However she doesn’t appear to know that ‘staunch’ is not the spelling used to indicate suppression of blood flow.
*Aphæresis?

The stories themselves are short, none is more than fourteen pages long and the typeface is quite large, but all say what they need to.

The Alphabet (or Love Letters or Writing Love Letters, Before I Forget How To Use Them or These Miserable Loops Look So Much Better On Paper Than in Practice) is narrated by someone who has lost the plot – and her glasses – describing the disintegration of her world after a diagnosis of aphasia. It has a list of the letters of the alphabet and the shapes they each describe.
Swatch features a boy worried about the multi-coloured flecks in his eyes – even after his father has shown him the definition of the Scottish word glaiks (flashes) on his phone screen.
In Attrib. a Foley artist commissioned to provide the sound effects for the audio of an exhibition of huge reproductions of Michael Angelo’s works is annoyed by the sounds she has been asked to add to the description of The Creation of Eve.
Smote (or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You In Front Of A Print By Bridget Riley) is a stream of consciousness of someone in a gallery standing before that artist’s Movement in Squares – “a painting the surface of which itches with vertigo” – being too self-conscious to kiss their companion. The story is shot through with black-and-white images.
Bs are the thoughts of a half-awake woman in her partner’s bed as she is disturbed by the noises of a bird outside and a bee trapped the night before in a used Nutella jar.
Alight at the Next has non-standard typography. It presents the thoughts of someone about to get off a tube train beside their lover, who is standing very close, but a man obstructs them by trying to get on. Our narrator places a finger on the man’s forehead to stop him.
Concision invokes words from Finnish, Bantu and Rapa Nui to describe the feelings of the recipient of a telephone call staring at the dots on the receiver while being unable to respond to the caller, whom we assume is a lover or spouse.
In And Back Again the answer to an easy question about love brings to the responder’s mind a lyric from the musical Oliver! and conjures the fantasy of a trip to Timbuktu to prove the extent of devotion.
Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan Chef is exactly what its title says, an enumeration of the thoughts of a chef who – highly illegally – “drowns ortolan in Armagnac” before cooking them to be eaten by diners who cover their heads in blankets while doing so.
Synaesthete, Would Like to Meet is narrated by someone who had the Yellow Pages dropped on her head aged 8 and ever since suffered from synæsthesia. Until, that is, a reply on a dating service and the subsequent date provides relief. Her therapist is not so happy about that.
Bulk sees a group of people with varied purposes converge on the carcase of a whale washed up on a beach early one morning.
In Platform, someone recalls the moment their friend left them forever via a poster made from a blown-up photograph taken at the time. The photograph reveals details of the scene unnoticed at the time.
Rosette Manufacture: A Catalogue and Spotter’s Guide is exactly what its title says. An employee of a rosette manufacture describing its wares.
Scutiform follows the thoughts of a museum attendant on their habitual route taken on their daily break past three particular statues.
Mischief features the consciousness of someone in charge of rats which have been trained to detect landmines.
Spines describes a small incident involving a hedgehog in a swimming pool on a family holiday to the south of France.
Spins opens with Johnson’s Dictionary definition of the word ‘spider’ complete with the letter ‘s’ rendered in that old style I can only reproduce as f. The fpider concerned is noticed by someone lying on a bed for hours trying to think of what could have been after a lover had slammed the door on their way out following an argument.

Pedant’s corner:- “millions of potentials colours” (potential colours,) Blu-Tack (x 2, Blu-Tak,) “the chew of a maw” (maws do not chew; they are stomachs,) “the Tube doors, doors shut” (the repetition is not needed but may be an attempt at ) “lickerish plastic” (lickerish means dainty, tempting or lecherous. Williams has her spellings confused; she had previously described the plastic as having the colour of liquorice,) “the hotel might provided” (might provide,) Areopagitca (Areopagitica,) “pulled the door close behind me” (closed?) “the woman with the urn ask the group” (asked.) Synaesthete (I’d prefer Synæsthete,) “you are not here any more to remind me that the plural should be croci” (the character has this wrong, the plural of crocus in English is indeed crocuses. In any case, crocus is derived from Greek [krokos] not Latin: the Greek plural would be krokodes.) “‘The bakers was shut’” (baker’s,) staunch (stanch,) “is an ‘an insect’” (has ‘an’ once too many.) In the acknowledgements; skillfully (skilfully.)