SINGULARITY by Charlotte Grimshaw

 I love Charlotte Grimshaw's writing. With the one exception - her last novel Mazarine which I just did not really get or enjoy. It was reassuring to read other reader reviews to see I wasn't the only one. Having just finished her outstanding and intimate memoir The Mirror Book,  I just had to go back to reading some of her earlier books. Again. A lot of her earlier writings feature in this memoir, and I do now have more understanding of her purpose in writing Mazarine. 

This collection of short stories was published in 2009, which is probably when I read it. She is an observer of people, of relationships, of the landscape and physical world around her. She writes lovingly and beautifully of the places she lives in, visits, holidays in. Even walking around her city, she writes evocative pictures of her settings with writing that draws you in, makes you part of the story, makes you feel what the story is. Her stories are about ordinary people, doing ordinary things, yet somehow she makes them important, special, meaningful. I read this collection again because she refers to many of the stories in her memoir, and how she came to write them. Some of them are based on things that happened to her in childhood, most notably a walk that three children under the age of 10 are sent on that almost ends in tragedy. The real walk and the fictional walk are almost identical in their telling, which is very chilling. After reading the memoir, many of the threads in her short stories make more sense, there is much greater depth to the stories because you now know where they come from. 

I really hope she goes back to writing like this, as she also has in her short story selection Opportunity, and in her earlier novels. I will go back to being a big fan.