Cornish Short Stories: A Collection of Contemporary Cornish Writing

Shortlisted for a Holyer an Gof Award 2019

This bold and striking new anthology showcases Cornwall's finest contemporary writers, combining established and new voices. Ghosts walk in the open and infidelities are conducted in plain sight. Two teenagers walk along a perfect beach in anticipation of a first kiss. Time stops for nothing - not even for death. Sometimes time cracks, disrupting a fragile equilibrium. These stories are peopled with locals and incomers, sailors and land dwellers; a diver searches the deep for what she has lost, and forbidden lovers meet in secret places. Throughout, the writers' words reveal a love of the incomparable Cornish landscape.

The Lost Of Syros

Long-listed for the Edge Hill Short Story Award 2016

Like the group of lovers caught in bittersweet relationships in the title story, the characters in this collection are all trying to find their way, whether it is to escape the hold of the past, understand the complexities of adult emotion, or face up to the shocking disjunction between dream and reality.

Set in diverse locations - from the Cornish Riviera to the lush fringes of the Australia’s tropical rainforest, from the wild beaches of southern New Zealand to the west coast of Ireland - revelations come to these characters unexpectedly: in a shower of gold on a snow-covered volcano in Antarctica; at a graffiti-scarred Aboriginal sacred site; in a mouthful of cake. The guiding spirit of the Modernist writer Katherine Mansfield flits through the collection as she picnics with her partner and a would-be lover by a Cornish lighthouse, writes her last words in Fontainebleau, and glides on the wings of an albatross past a tiny hamlet on the edge of the Southern Ocean. In these stories, characters learn to understand and, at times, to overcome their distress, whether it is caused by neglect, loss or any other of life’s difficulties. Added to this is the potent magic of fiction itself, and the power of place to heal us and help us move on.

Travelling in the Dark

Winner of the Hall and Woodhouse DLF Writing Prize 2019. Long-listed for the Not the Booker Prize 2019 and selected as a Big Issue Summer Read 2018.

Travelling back to her home town with her young son, Sarah is ready to face up to what she ran away from ten years ago. As delays and diversions force her to return to well-known places from her youth, Sarah reflects on the relationships with her family and the events of the past that have shaped her present. Set in the wild, beautiful and unreliable landscape of southern New Zealand, Emma Timpany’s novella is an evocative story of a woman coming to terms with her past.

Three Roads

How do the choices we make, willingly or not, define us?

A young man working in a menial job finds a way to grow closer to a lost love. A long-married couple’s relationship is tested by the arrival of a rare bird. With the benefit of hindsight, a woman recalls a childhood episode of acute appendicitis. An outing to a plant nursery brings simmering family tensions explosively to the surface. Two walkers on a beach, unused to the suddenness of a tropical nightfall, lose their way. The chance to grow flowers in a Cornish field brings two strangers together, allowing them both a chance to heal.

The characters in these stories find themselves at crossroads: for better or for worse, their lives are about to change. In settings which range from Cornwall’s hidden valleys to the grey, gold and green of Paris in spring, from Central Otago’s alpine lakes to the Milky Way’s river of light, come bids for freedom, transformations, and another chance to get things right.

Botanical Short Stories: Contemporary writing about plants and flowers

From tokens of love to neolithic burial gifts, bridal bouquets to seasonal wreaths, healing potions to artistic masterpieces, flowers and plants have a multitude of meanings and a long and complex relationship with us. They brighten our homes and delight us in garden and countryside, convey our emotions and symbolise the stages of our human lives. Throughout the anthology, interactions with the natural world bring opportunities for new beginnings, transformation, and a chance to heal.

A group of botanists in search of rare species dismiss local custom at their peril. Love in all its wildness and wonder is found clinging to crumbling chalk cliffs and growing through cracks on city streets. A scientist takes a radical step to understand her houseplant. A poet remembers her beloved flowers, and the longing for a magnificent tropical garden outlasts death.

This rich and wide-ranging collection celebrates the deep connection that exists between people and plants in fourteen short stories as varied, diverse, and global as the botanical world itself.