Fen: Stories

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The tales are populated by albatrosses, foxes and cats who seem to know more than they ought to, and the result is a creepy but beautiful debut book from an exceptionally talented young English author.

A collection of short stories as a literary debut which are really difficult to classify but are impressive. They are set in the fens. The fenlands cover parts of East Anglia, Cambridgeshire and southern Lincolnshire. I am a Lincolnshire lad: I wasn’t born or brought up in the fens, but I know them fairly well. One thing you do get a lot of in the fens is eels (not quite as many as there used to be). Coincidentally I went to a farmers market this morning and inevitably there were eels (filleted and smoked, whole and smoked and jellied). Although reading the first story in this collection may make you wary of eating any. it is very wild, but somehow also very domestic. i wanted it to break free and run off across the fens and tell me more about that land. I don’t think I would have wanted to write a book that everybody liked,” she says. “That would have missed the point.” Kushner, Rachel; Burns, Anna; Edugyan, Esi; Robertson, Robin; Powers, Richard; Johnson, Daisy (13 October 2018). "How I write: Man Booker shortlist authors reveal their inspirations". The Guardian . Retrieved 13 October 2018.

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Image: “And now for something completely different” – Monty Python’s Albatross sketch ( Source and htt Every story is deliberate and stark. Even as I read simple exchanges, it seems like the characters are meant to be lit via chiaroscuro... Nora… was good at all those things nobody much wanted to be good at… she was logical and somewhat cold… She was larger than was fashionable.”

Daisy Johnson’s debut publication is composed of a series of linked short stories that take place in the marshlands of eastern England. It’s a lonely job, and the pull of tides and sea creatures is stronger than the pull of the nearby townsfolk. For another magical look at such themes, see Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping (see my review see my review HERE).Yeah. She took the first crate, upping it on her hip. She did not know why he always asked; she felt always busy: out every morning sifting for goods through the sands, scanning the water for something left behind. He didn't think magpie work amounted to much; he didn't know any better. I know who you are though in a moment I will not. It is getting. I do not remember the word. Soon it will be. How easily they go again. There is no loyalty in language. There is no...” Does she feel that, if one’s opinion of a writer and their work changes, the value of that first reading can survive? Yes, she thinks so. Her feeling as a writer is that once you send a book into the world, you relinquish it to its readers, and that many Harry Potter fans are demonstrating what it means to be attached to a work of fiction: “That doesn’t mean that we can’t be critical about it and certainly we should be critical about the things we love, and people we love, but we can still remember it fondly and it can still be a very important part of who we are and our culture.” We meet the sisters some time after an unspecified disaster that has sent them to a tumbledown seaside house in the North York Moors. Their father is dead – he is a mysterious, often malign absence in the novel, like, says Johnson, a monster in the corner – and the move has precipitated a depression in their mother so severe that she, too, becomes absent, leaving them to forage tinned food and roam about the place while she remains shut up in a bedroom. But it’s the sense of peril that Johnson builds, a kind of suppressed, poltergeist energy, that makes the book propulsive and disturbing far more than any single plot detail. What was she trying to do? Daisy Johnson (born 1990) is a British novelist and short story writer. [1] Her debut novel, Everything Under, was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, [2] and beside Eleanor Catton is the youngest nominee in the prize's history. For her short stories, she has won three awards since 2014.