Wallflowers

Author(s): Eliza Robertson

Short Stories

A small boy and his grandmother set sail for China in the mud of her back yard; a supermarket car park becomes a graveyard of strewn blueberries; migratory birds fly over a marshland ringing with the sound of wooden spoons on kitchen pots; and the breaking of a silence between two roommates leads to disquieting revelations. Eliza Robertson's delicate and startling stories tell of the adventure of the ordinary and the magic within the everyday. Here there are swindlers and innocents, unlikely heroes and gritty survivors; they teach us how to trap hummingbirds, relinquish dreams gracefully and feed raccoons without getting bitten. From windswept Pacific beaches to cafes in the heart of Lisbon, and from the depths of puddles on mountain running paths to the heights of extrasolar plant 51 Osiris C, these are tales of wildness and wonder, of animals in search of an escape and outsiders looking for a way back in.

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From the winner of the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize comes a delicate and startling collection about the adventure within the ordinary and the magic within everyday life

Confirms her as a significant new talent ... The ordinary and everyday become imbued with a strange significance, albeit with a feather-light touch; Robertson's prose is never weighed down, even as it imparts a sense of uneasiness, anticipation ... Robertson lets images vibrate with possibilities. Almost every story, individually, is sharp, illuminating Independent on Sunday The stories in Eliza Robertson's first collection are filled with lush flora and fauna, both real and figurative ... Assured and ambitious Guardian Her stories display a startlingly original way of looking at the world, finding magic and mystery in ordinary life ... An exciting new voice in short fiction The Lady Robertson is often thus adventurous when it comes to her structures ... It's the richness of her prose that draws one in Independent Robertson's prose can stand alongside any writer I think to name ... her style and her stories are uniquely her own, at once observant and playful, sometimes wise, sometimes ironic, always lyrical and always haunting D. W. Wilson, author of Ballistics Captivating ... Amid the catastrophe, there is a delicate beauty in the details Robertson selects Scotland on Sunday An unsettling debut collection of short stories Mail on Sunday

Eliza Robertson was born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1987 and grew up on Vancouver Island. She studied creative writing and political science at the University of Victoria and then pursued her MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, while there she received the Man Booker Scholarship and the Curtis Brown Prize for best writer. Robertson is now a highly celebrated short story writer; she has won three national fiction contests in Canada and the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, has been twice longlisted for the Journey Prize and was a finalist for the CBC Short Story contest. She currently lives in Norwich and is working on completing her first novel. @ElizaRoberts0n

General Fields

  • : 9781408856826
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : February 2016
  • : 198mm X 129mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : February 2016
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Eliza Robertson
  • : Paperback
  • : 2016
  • : 813.6
  • : 304