Welcome back to Barbara Kingsolver country. You know, the Appalachia of the mind and soul. Dellarobia Turnbow is climbing a mountain – literally – to escape her life. She knows she is risking losing her marriage, breaking up her family, throwing away every certain thing she has, and what she feels is “one part rapture.” [...]

It is a measure of the strength of Emma Donoghue’s reputation — much enhanced by her previous book, the bestselling novel Room — that she has been allowed to publish a collection of short stories, although conventional wisdom decrees it a financially risky proposition for publishers. This is good news for readers who enjoy this form of storytelling, which requires the writer to pack a narrative punch into a limited space.

Arthur Williams is a confused and unhappy 10-year-old with an enquiring mind. He spends a lot of time alone in the woods behind his house, thinking about stuff. He thinks about trees, and God, the Big Bang, and his real father (he is convinced his father Simon is not his real father, although it is unclear why he has hit on this particular idea). He doesn’t much like his neighbourhood playmate Simon, who he thinks “just wants to french” their other friend Victoria Brown. Arthur does like Victoria Brown, but when she frenches him, he tells her “I can’t be your boyfriend.”  It is also unclear why he does this.

Philomena is a farmwife in rural Ireland. She has a dull husband, problematic children, and a small gang of “girls” with whom she regularly has cups of tea. Her life is shaped by the round of meals that must be made and housework that must be done, with an occasional excursion into town on the bus; it is on one of these that her life begins to slide out of coherence – or its lack of coherence becomes visible. It takes some skill to evoke a life that many would experience as narrow and limiting, and yet have the reader feel the characters’ satisfaction with it. It takes even more skill to show a person utterly convinced of the logic of her madness, and even as the reader sees that it is mad, easily accepts that the protagonist doesn’t experience it that way. Anakana Schofield skates swiftly and easily along the fine lines between various qualities of perception and makes the reader see them simultaneously.