Mrs Pulaska and Other Stories

An academic visits a town for the first time, but is told he has lived there before; an elderly mother becomes overwhelmed by a sensual past; these are the sharply observed elements to three of the seventeen outstanding stories in this unforgettable collection by the acclaimed novelist Christopher Burns.

With this new collection the acclaimed novelist Christopher Burns proves his mastery of the short story form. His intelligent but conflicted characters face their decisive moments across wide ranges of time and place, each action reshaping their futures and redefining their pasts. Interplaying with these choices are locations that underpin and define each story, such as a repository of unstable nitrate film, a desert outcrop where a daughter vanished, a winter barn in which a silent refugee works without explanation, and a Parisian suicide that echoes down far more than a century.

In these stories, landscape itself can be a determinant, as essential to the narrative as the characters that walk into a draining reservoir, a Neolithic cave, or a remote Greek church. For these are driven people – haunted or determined, alert or unaware, lovers or doubters, saviours or perpetrators.

Several of these stories have previously appeared in publications as diverse as Les Temps Modernes, Granta Shorts, Best British Short Stories, The Time Out Book of New York Stories and Prospect.

Christopher Burns’ work has been praised by Kazuo Ishiguro, Melvyn Bragg, Margaret Drabble, Hilary Mantel and others. He is the author of six novels, including The Flint Bed (shortlisted for the Whitbread award), The Condition of Ice, A Division of the Light, and an earlier collection of short stories, About The Body. He lives in Cumbria.

This is a wholly distinctive, ambitious and challenging collection that can be read again and again.

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