Vicky Grut

Exploring a host of female parts, rites of passage, love, loss, danger, revelations, strange relationships, the pleasures and pains of growing up female, a fantastic collection of short stories from some of the best women writers today dealing with all aspects of female life from youth to old age. Includes stories from: Hilary Bailey, Sally Cameron, Betzy Dinesen, Souad Faress, Chrissie Gittins, Bonnie Greer, Vicky Grut, Kirsty Gunn, Brigid Howarth, Mizzy Hussain, Geraldine Kaye, Carolyn Patrick, Ellen Phethean, Kate Pullinger, Stella Rafferty, Ravinder Randhawa, Máire Ní Réagáin, Michéle Roberts, Daphne Rock, Elisa Segrave, Kirsty Seymour-Ure, Susanna Steele & Karen Whiteson.

Each of the 14 stories feels like a short novel. Vicky Grut has taken inspiration from a range of often ordinary situations and shows how easily things can unravel. They veer from the realistic to the surreal, nothing is quite what it seems, and Vicky's original way of observation is a revelation. These collected stories make you ponder about who is in control of one's destiny. The stories form a series of metaphors covering different aspects of life, and the closing story about the ultimate end is very moving. To give you a flavour of what they are like here are a few snippets: In Rich, two young people travelling towards Florence just after the Bologna bombing of 1980, decide to cadge a meal and a bed for the night from a girl they barely know. In the early hours of the morning, the atmosphere suddenly changes. They are in over their heads. In Mistaken, an academic is mistaken for a shop assistant in a big London department store. When she reacts impulsively she finds herself in trouble. Help comes from an unlikely quarter - and for all the wrong reasons. In Downsizing, Julianne and Tom are all that remain of their company's department of Policy and Evaluation. Julianne reads management theory and they exchange faintly erotic phone calls while they work on their organisational review, until Julianne has a visionary idea. In Live Show, Drink Included, two young people on a day-trip to London decide to see a Soho sex-show, obsessed with getting a free drink, they are in for a surprise. In Into the Valley, a woman tries to comfort her suffering mother-in-law on ward 19 in a small hospital in Wales. Underneath the ward sign it says, in English and in Welsh, `Bereavement Office / Swyddfa Profedigaeth.' There probably isn't a ward 20.