Sunstroke and other stories

This collection of stories, all of which were first published in either the New Yorker, Granta, or The Guardian, were very favourably reviewed in national papers (e.g. Guardian and TLS) and have been longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. Reviews stressed their originality: 'it is as though nineteenth-century values - about the proper use of intelligence, perhaps, and conversation - have been applied to contemporary ideas about desire' (Guardian) (originality). The stories make connections to a tradition of short story writing in English, preoccupied by desire and by time passing (Bowen, Munro), but they also update that tradition in order to capture a new and distinctively twenty-first century ethos, bourgeois and domestic, liberal and sceptical (significance). The writing makes its move continually between a denoting close-textured 'realism' and a reflective conceptualising voice, interpreting and commenting on what has 'happened', making a relationship between the particularity of lives imagined and the large shapes and problems of history, culture, literary change, and intellectual enquiry (rigour). Published in USA by Picador, ISBN 0312425996.