September 2016

Short Stories

At the moment I’m working on my next novel, WHIRLIGIG, about a Spitfire pilot during WWII. (See photo).So while I’m head down (or sometimes in the clouds) it seems a good time to highlight some of my short stories, both published and unpublished.

There was a bookcase in my childhood home where one shelf held a row of small green volumes, the complete set of Chekhov stories. In the long school holidays when I’d read every novel in the house, I turned to these volumes, picking at random and immediately entering the absorbing world of nineteenth century Russia. Each story was excitingly complete, nasty old men, vain young men, clever girls, scheming women caught vividly in the spotlight of the great master’s imagination.

Since then I’ve always read and written short stories, aware of the challenges working in an art form where each word must count, unlike in novels where you can build with sentences. Here is my latest very short story, inspired by recent political jockeying.

n.b. For information on GLORY look under ‘Books’ and ‘Thoughts’