Sophia Barnes

The best of the stories in Hold Your Fire are those which combine the keenness of Wilson’s perception with a sense of narrative containment.

The Animals in that Country was published in March 2020. It might be tempting to see the timing of publication as serendipitous, or portentous, depending on your perspective. A novel about a ‘zoanthropathic’ super-flu precipitating wholesale social breakdown, published in the panicked first months of a zooanotic global pandemic. But Laura McKay’s novel, despite its timeliness, is not so intimately tied to the current moment – its vision is broader, and far more interesting. In this particular apocalypse, the foundational threat to human social structures is the emergence of unprecedented insight into the non-human world.

Wood’s writing continues to grow in assurance which each new work: never fussy, but grounded, and intensely physical.

The authors share a lyrical sensibility and a finely-tuned sense of how the fantastical and the mundane, the hopeful and the brutal, are woven together in the stories which define our communities.

Anthony Uhlmann has long been interested in the philosophical function of literature – not only its capacity to contain philosophical discussion, but the formal unfolding of the literary work itself as a philosophical act. St Antony in His Desert, Uhlmann’s first foray into fiction, is an unapologetically cerebral book, incorporating a key debate in the early twentieth-century clash between philosophy and physics.’

In the Garden of the Fugitives is Ceridwen Dovey’s second novel, and her third book-length publication. Her debut Blood Kin…

Sofie Laguna was a successful writer of children’s and YA fiction before publishing her first novel for adults, One Foot Wrong, in 2008. Readers of that startling debut, or of her 2015 Miles Franklin Award winner The Eye of the Sheep, will find many familiar themes in her latest novel The Choke. Each is concerned with the struggle of a vulnerable child to define and to protect him- or herself in a grown-up world; each an astute, affecting exploration of the particular pressures that parental neglect and violence place on the children who observe and absorb it.’

If, for much of our lives, we regard our parents as indispensable to ourselves, defined and understood by their relationship to us – whether loving or fractious, distant or close – then this last work is Lessing’s gift to hers: a belated acknowledgement of Alfred and Emily as individuals, separate from her and from one another. She offers them a world without the war; without each other; perhaps most intriguingly, without their daughter – and by extension, without their author.’

The short story is sometimes viewed as an apprentice form, yet the heterogeneity of the stories collected in these volumes attests to its adaptability in structure, style, voice and genre – and to the particular freedoms it offers as a site for experimentation.

The world in which we find ourselves begins to blur around the edges, its parameters shifting and changing. Precisely how we are to understand the room and its relationship to Shelley’s consciousness is never clear, and becomes less clear with each new encounter between the world within and outside its walls.

Two memoirs, one fiction? Or one family history, two fictions entwined into a single narrative, and a ‘reflection on the arc of a life’? All three of these books show women writing themselves into being, as they construct narrative from the raw materials of unwieldy lives, whether imagined or real. Each writes and rewrites sensation, tactile detail, exchange or confrontation, revising and rediscovering through the process. Sophia Barnes on new work by Drusilla Modjeska, Debra Adelaide and Beth Yahp

‘The mantle of emerging author can be a heavy one, particularly for those whose work has already garnered critical acclaim at manuscript stage. While these three share the advantage such attention brings them in what is a busy marketplace for new writers, their work displays a marked diversity of theme and form.’ Sophia Barnes on new books by Miles Allinson, Murray Middleton, and Cass Moriarty.

At the centre of each of these narratives – nine short stories and three novels – is a woman or a girl. Some are empathetic, others cruelly selfish; some are extroverts and others aloof; some are acerbically witty and others dangerously naive. Despite their diversity and their different locations in history, place and time of life, most of them are far more resilient than they perceive themselves to be.

The decision to write in a semi-autobiographical style raises inevitable questions. Is this fiction or autobiography? To what degree can we speak of the narrator ‘Luke Carman’ as a ‘character’ in the author Luke Carman’s collection of vignettes?

‘So why write novels?’ Doris Lessing asks in the preface she affixed to her most famous work, The Golden Notebook, almost ten years after its first publication in 1962. Her semi-rhetorical question stemmed from a conviction that within another ten years the world as she knew it would be swept away.