BRIEF LIVES
Christopher Meredith (Seren)
Short story collections, despite an author’s best efforts, are rarely focused, cohesive affairs. With Brief Lives, however, Christopher Meredith has managed to not only produce six stellar short stories, but has threaded each together with the mutual foundations of pastoral and working-class communities. Firstly, the collection is a meditation on memory, focusing around tradition and community-based historiographies. The second story in the collection, Progress, is both its shortest and most effective piece, neatly acting as both a meditation on industrial displacement, as well as the contradictory and awkward feeling of missing a negative place of employment. The rest of the stories meander between everyday events we take for granted, but Meredith has the knowledge that these are the events that ground us.
Price: £9.99. Info: www.serenbooks.com
words Ben Newman