Sophisticated Short Stories out now: Failed Summer Vacation By Heuijung Hur, Poppyland By D J Taylor, The Latehomecomer By Mavis Gallant

There’s an air of quiet mystery to these seven askance short stories, a sense that nighttime dreaminess has seeped into the daytime world, leaving reality awash with strange, unsettling feelings and inexplicable happenings.

Hur’s world is one of emotional alienation and failed human connection.

Unexplained, menacing triangles fall from the sky in a story that begins with housemates deciding to get a dog (Shard), a smashed music box becomes symbolic of a troubled friendship (Ruined Winter Holiday), and a futuristic Earth is the scene of unexpected violence between crew members on an expedition team (Flying in the Rain).

Norwich is the geographical setting for most of the stories in this wry, wistful, astutely observed collection, but its real territory is that liminal space where hopes and dreams are dashed against the disappointing realities of the present.

Relationships drift, husbands stray, families fight, ambitions are thwarted and even eyeliner is ‘overwrought’.

D J Taylor is an affectionate chronicler of his characters’ failings and eccentric foibles, gracing the melancholy of their situations with surprising shimmers of beauty from the ‘great wide sky’ in Drowning in Hunny to the warm glimmer of poppies ‘crimson and consoling’ in Poppyland.

Canadian author Mavis Gallant was an exceptional short story writer, with over a hundred stories to her credit, most of which were published in The New Yorker.

The 16 sophisticated tales gathered here beautifully capture the elegance and economy of her prose.

Her characters are displaced, out of step with themselves and their surroundings, dislocated by war or hardship, the hapless husbands, put upon wives and a wry observant child struggle to find their place in a changing world.

None more so than Thomas, who’s the Latehomecomer of the collection’s title; a young German prisoner of war arrives home, and – swamped with overwhelmingly bitter memories – he’s advised by a fascist neighbour-turned-black-marketeer to do the impossible: ‘Forget everything …Forget. Forget.’