Description
Book SynopsisLong-listed for the 2016 Edge Hill Short Story Prize
Songs of the drowned and a dog with wings…
“The world was a grey place once, concrete grey and striped with grey; clay against stone. The pigeons stretched out their scrawny lives and lived as creatures must. Yet they were not hateful birds. They wore their poverty like overcoats; they sat upon the highest places and drizzled the whole world with their compassion. Their souls were dignified as tarnished spoons; pigeons bore witness to the sadness and the tearing of the wind.”
By turns tender and unsettling, this book lurks at the tattered edges of the world, where Satan’s daughter wants to die of love and a woman is paralysed with fear in the 24-hours Tesco. There are jokes here too, and you cannot trust the ground beneath your feet. The angels keep stealing God’s fags and the dog is hauled up before a kangaroo court.
Fates of The Animals is a book for those who remember fairytales and the TV Test-card; those who like to feel a little uneasy; those who sometimes lie awake in the night.
Trade ReviewTarrant’s book of stories claps in blacked rooms, has a smile as wide as the Ripper’s blade, prowls in midnight back alleys until the threadbare structure of the world’s bones has some meat. It’s not jaded, it has wonder, she would stop to gain knowledge of leaves ballet dancing down in a purple sky, and that’s a rarity nowadays in this cynical world of austerity and celebrity. They could even be read to children as bedtime stories, and that is the greatest compliment I think I could give.
-- Grant Tarbard * Ink, Sweat and Tears *
Table of Contents
- The music of the foxes
- The hyacinth girl
- Barking
- The Little Boy Who Lied
- How the dog lost his wings
- The Upstart
- Pigeons in a time of famine
- Flying
- Dog’s nightmare I
- Hungry
- After it Rained
- Infestation
- Lost
- Meat
- Smile
- Instructions (for a game)
- Angels II
- Dog Finds out Where Knives Come From
- Collision
- Dog’s Nightmare II
- The Guilty
- Rats
- De la Viande
- The Disappearing
- Magpie falls in Love
- The Organ Press
- Slow-Motion
- After Van Gogh
- Birthing
- The Black Wood
- Gone
- Hellfire
- Test card F
- Suffocate
- Some last requests
- Phoenix
- Here, everything is still floating
- Anti-climax (or the end of a game)
- The Opposite of Falling
- Piglet
- Three Children are Menaced by a Nightingale (After Ernst)
- At the show trial
- Winter at home
- Holiday
