Animals At Night
Naomi Booth
(Dead Ink, 2022)
A woman takes the body
of her dead mother on a macabre farewell tour prior to carrying out a DIY
burial, the owners of a dairy farm encounter an ancient curse, and a young
woman is haunted by the sight of a dead hare she sees lying at the roadside.
Anyone worried about
the health of the short story as a literary form need only read this collection
to be reassured that it is fighting fit. Booth, already the author of three
acclaimed novels, has crafted a set of tales that demonstrate empathy,
imagination, and a knack for unsettling her readers.
Booth writes about a
world that is recognizably the one we occupy, but that has been tilted out of
kilter somehow. A place where the mundane and the weird rub uncomfortably
together inhabited by people who have been pushed to the margins of their own
lives.
On the strength of this
collection of stories and her novels, Naomi Booth shows the potential to become
one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary British fiction.
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