This collection contains three short stories. The first follows a man about to get married, only for the wedding to collapse at the very last moment. The second centres on a writer staying in Heinrich Böll’s house during a residency, where she is disturbed by an old man who seems to think she does not belong there. She eventually takes revenge in her own way by writing him into her story and killing him off. The third story, perhaps the most unsettling, tells of a married woman seeking an affair who ends up tied to the bed of a complete stranger. The three stories are extremely different in tone and style, yet each one is compelling and memorable in its own way.
“The nun at school told us it would last for all eternity,” she said, pulling the skin off her trout, “And when we asked how long eternity lasted, she said: “Think of all the sand in the world, all the beaches, all the sand quarries, the ocean beds, the deserts. Now imagine all that sand in an hourglass, like a gigantic egg timer. If one grain of sand drops every year, eternity is the length of time it takes for all the sand in the world to pass through that glass. Just think! That terrified us. We were very young.”
Contents
So Late in the Day first published in the New Yorker (2022) / The Long and Painful Death first published Walk the Blue Fields (2007) / Antarctica first published in Antartica (1999)