Flash Fiction Writing: 7 Rules for Success

Flash fiction is usually defined as being under 1,000 words. As a writer who loves the long and complex novel, something that weighs a ton and takes a nice long time to read, I'm quite a stranger to 'less than 1000'. But I'm now trying to write a couple of <1000s, each month, at around 500-700 words and I'm enjoying it. I'm sharing some of these short-shorts on Substack. 

They say it all started with the 'six-word story' written by Ernest Hemingway (which we all know, don't we? For sale, baby shoes, never worn...)  Here's some more recent 6-word attemps, 

"Wrong number," said a familiar voice."

"Ghost seeks body. No experience necessary." 

"Introduced myself to myself. Amnesia hurts."

Six-words stories are clever, but I don't find them very satisfying. I prefer something that has a clear beginning, middle and end, even though it's only hundreds of words long. Every so often I offer one to be read: you can find my latest here, on Substack:

I've learnt a few lessons as I've been honing the craft. And it is a craft, and possibly an art; people continue to debate the difference between these stories and poetry. I'm not going down that wormhole today except to say that flashfiction must tell a story; a poem does not need to. 

Very short fiction depends on having complete control of point of view and language including tense, and working out how much detail to put in your story. Reading Short Circuit, the book about writing short fiction, (editied by Vanessa Gebbe), I noticed that a famous early short-shortist, Edgar Keret, had five staunch rules for the form. 

Number One: Sweat the Title 

'Make it work for a living', Keret recommends. it can anchor the story, or illuminate the theme, click with the surprise in store for the reader, explain the plot, develop character flaws or expand a metaphore you're weaving in. You could steal it  (titles are pretty immune from plagiarism rules), add hidden context, create drama, friction, emotion. The best advice is; don't use vague terms. Don't call your story about your cat, The Cat's Adventure. Call it Midnight Escapology, or something even wilder. 

Number Two: Don't use too many Characters 

A story of  less than 1,000 words can’t hold the number of characters longer pieces can. It must have the least number of characters and one point of view.

Number Three: Start in the Middle

Use your In Medias Res knowledge to drop into the story as late as you possibly can. You don't have time for exposition or scene setting. You don't have space for life stories.

Number Four: Make Sure the Ending is in the not at the End

Creating a microscopic volta can help focus a flash fiction. Volta is a literary term for a turning point which shifts the perspective. this way you can summarise the narrative in very few words, exposing the emotional core of the story. Keret believed that getting to the denouement before the end helps the reader wind the story down as it plays out.

Number Five: Make your Last Line Ring like a Bell.

Your last line isn't your ending; we had that at that volta moment (above). Keret says the last line should leave the reader wth something which will continue to sound after the story has finished...take us into a new place, where we can continue to think about the ideas in the story, puzzle over them.

The more I practise the art of flash fiction, honing it each time I start a new story, the more I realise that, five rules just isn't enough! So I'm adding these two to the mix:

Number Six: Hook your Reader with Voice. 

Character is a defining force in flash fiction, therefore, the voice of the narrator becomes an essential component in hooking the reader in from the beginning. Create a distinct voice that is saying something arresting and original.

Number Seven: Tighten to Get the Word Count Down

Flash fiction thrives on compression. There is no time to stop and smell the roses, so sneak your description in, using powerful imagery to convey emotions and themes You have to imply any world-building with no extra wordage. Flashbacks really don't work, and you can cut down on speech tags––and eliminate adverbs. Avoid exposition; SHOW everthing and TELL nothing. Remove details unless they are critical to the meaning of your story. Take out everything that doesn't move the story on––even dialogue if it holds the story up. In fact, the only thing I insist on including in my short fiction is the name of the narrator. I know writers love to keep that quiet, but readers really want to know. 

But Remember––Rules, are made to be broken! 

Who knows, a flashback may make the story sing. The entire piece could be in dialogue; or description. You might find three characters are really necessary! Nothing is impossible. Because flash fiction is as much fun to write as it is to read.

7 Writing Tips from 7 Respected Authors

  

Seven Writing Tips from 7 Respected Authors ...and me.

1.  Maggie O’Farrell

‘What I wish I’d known when I was starting out, is that you don’t have to worry about beginnings. Don’t worry too much about knowing what you’re doing at the beginning. You can start in the middle if you want! Just put the words down.’

2.  Iris Murdoch 

Writing is about practice, and not about luck.

3. Lionel Shriver 

‘Write whatever you damned well want. Trying to please ends up pleasing no one, including yourself. And caution is boring. Especially in these touchy times, I suggest getting yourself into trouble. (That won’t be hard.)’

4. Virginia Wolf (from Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, Woolf’s famous essay)

Eavesdrop. Listen to the way people speak, but pay special attention to their silence.

5. Katherine Mansfield

Looking back I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.

6. Hilary Mantel 

Be ready for anything. Each new story has different demands and may throw up reasons to break these and all other rules. Except number one: you can't give your soul to literature if you're thinking about income tax.

7.  Zadie Smith

Work on a computer that is disconnected to the internet. 

.

...and me...  Imagine your scenes in your head, imagine the dialogues taking place and the setting coming alive. Imagine a character saying to you––"no–I'm not doing exactly what you planned for me, I'm doing this, instead!

STARTING TO WRITE: The Secret Rules of Writing Golden Dialogue

Want to write better, snappier, clearer, more empathetic…in fact…golden dialogue? 

There are rules that help you succeed. They're not exactly 'secret' but certainly they can only be found 'under the counter'. Here they are.

Handled with energy, dialogue can turn a good story into a winning story.  Readers like a lot of dialogue because it spaces out the words on the page, easing the reader’s eye, but it is also one of the best ways of creating living characters. Dialogue is crucial to modern writing and can be as fast-paced and exciting as action.

Perhaps a definition of what dialogue is might get us started. Dialogue always takes place between at least 2 characters, just as real conversations involve at least 2 people. 

If you are a little uncertain that the dialogue you write enables your characters to build their personalities and engage with their readers, you might try the series of exercise we are going to look at in this blog and take note of the Seven Golden Rules we're going to examine. 

The First Golden Rule:

Dialogue must never be written for its own sake

This is one rule that will help you construct conversations you can be proud of: To prevent your characters unwittingly breaking this rule is simple. Always be sure that any conversation you create has at least one of the following functions:

• Impart information 
• enrich the characterization
• move the plot along 
• develop the characters further within the story 
• further the complexities of the plot 
• crank up the pace,
• enhance the theme or core truth 
• reflect relationship changes and emotions

Kitchen Table Exercise one

Take your notebook to a specific location of your choice where people move or linger, such as a gallery, a country park, a shopping mall. Sit with your notebook closed and observe the way people use the area, listening to snippets of conversation, but also inventing the ‘follow ons’ you don’t actually hear. Think about body language especially, and also reactions to the place. Try to see the place through the eyes of the people there. Start making jotted snatches of dialogue scenes, using what you see and what you hear about you.

Golden Rule two: 

For dialogue to feel natural, it can’t ever be natural. 

Real conversation is dull and repetitive. People stutter, or forget a word. They don’t quite catch what others say, interrupt themselves with inconsequential, often illogical comments, and go off the point, changing subjects, becoming irrelevant. Real people trip over their words and produce poor syntax that sounds unintentionally comic. In fact real speech is 80% inconsequential; humdrum data of living, and at least 10% more is in shorthand, because we know the other person so well, we don’t need to use full speech to get in tune with them – it’s how we human’s mostly communicate. 

Having listened to people chatting in the mall, you will now be aware that prose dialogue cannot be transcribed directly from real speech – the writer must edit it. As well as smoothing over the verbose cracks, this editing should smooth the ride by breaking up longer speeches with description, action and observation.

To put this succinctly, for dialogue to feel natural, it can’t ever be natural. This is something that is learnt as one reads, writes and listens, and the more dialogue one writes, the easier it becomes. Try listening to conversations then transposing them into dialogue to help enhance this skill.

Start a new piece of dialogue between two characters you're working with, or would like to create. But instead of setting it out in the normal format for dialogue, set it out as a script. To create a strong rhythm, emulating the simple A, B, pattern for your two speakers. This can be very liberating, and should at least persuade you to create a scene, with dialogue, if you find yourself generally writing exposition. It will also encourage the dialogue writer who is having trouble with Rule Two  to get into a good A B tempo. Make sure you are naturally changing the line length of each speaker at will__________________________________________________

Golden Rule Three;

Dialogue should be pertinent to the character’s personality.

Don’t allow the character to talk with your voice; they need their own. Don’t allow all the characters to sound the same; this is an ‘early’ mistake and one that can be spotted by reading your work aloud. Try to ‘get into the shoes’ of the person speaking, so that it’s their words on the page…not the writer’s. Allow various characters to have differing speech patterns, but do not go overboard with this; it can lead to reader irritation. Be particularly careful about accent or dialect; use one small thing that can exemplify the speech pattern and leave it at that. Keep well clear of phonic representation. If you read Christopher Brookmyre’s crime fiction, you will see a master of this skill at work, but his passages of lowland Scottish dialect are often difficult to follow.

Kitchen Table Exercise Three

Place a character you’re working with, or hoping to work with, in a situation where they have to talk. Think about how they would react. Not how you'd react, but them. 

See things through your character’s eyes. You don’t need to link this with any writing you’re doing at the moment. This time, use what you’re seeing and hearing alongside what you are imagining. Now is your chance to allow your character to speak as this individual might. Think about this person before you start, and all the way through writing the piece. Allow them to speak to another character, or in some other way, if it helps.____________________________________________

Golden Rule Four: 

Be careful how you impart information

Although Golden Rule One states that dialogue can be used to impart information, keep that fact hidden, otherwise speech will sound ‘stagey. Staged dialogue is speech where we overhear characters telling us something the writer wants the reader to know, but the characters already know, usually in creaking speeches...

‘How are you Mary?’ asked Sue. 

‘Well,’ said Mary. ‘Since the death of John, six months ago, I’ve been very depressed.’

How do you overcome these problems? One way is to use interior monologue:

‘How are you Mary?’ Sue knew that Mary had been depressed since John’s death, but

even so, she was hoping for more than a grim sigh in answer to her question. 

‘No better, to be honest with you,’ said Mary.

Another is to wrack your brains for a more ‘natural’ approach:

 ‘How are you Mary?’

 ‘No better.’

 ‘What is it now...six months?’

 ‘Yes. But it’s like John’s about to walk in the door any moment.’

Another approach I recommend is not to worry too much about imparting this sort of information in the first place. Readers like mystery, even if the story isn’t actually genre mystery. They like to be teased, so long as the mystery is solved somewhere along the line:

‘How are you Mary?’

‘No better.

‘What’s it now? Six months?’

Sue gave a grim sigh. ‘Feels like six years sometimes and six hours at others.’

Here's another place stagy dialogue rears its head:

‘As you already know, Henry, the polyribodigestive test tube results are outstanding. And you also know that we’ve found a guinea pig for the transplant experiment among the staff  - at least, when we say guinea pig, of course, we mean flunky.’ Henry’s assistant leered at him...

Kitchen Table Exercise Four

Search through previous pieces of your writing to find some dialogue that now, you might consider 'staged'. Try rewriting it. By treating characters and their dialogue as if the story grew organically out of the world they inhabit, you will find yourself naturally only giving your reader only just enough information detail. ‘Just enough’ can be interpreted as ‘far less than you first imagine they’ll need’. For a start, you don’t want to write down to them, or treat them as fools. But also, they will be quite happy to read along, delighting in finding the details are revealed bit by bit, in just the same way as the example of Mary’s bereavement. 

Golden Rule Number Five 

Who Should be Talking?

It is a standard guideline, especially for short stories, that a conversation should not be reported directly on a page unless a key (focus) character is in it – in other words, characters your story cannot do without. Clearly, both the protagonist and the antagonist are essential characters, but it is up the writer to decide which other characters are key. In actually deciding this, it is quite a good idea to pose the question the opposite way round; which of your characters could actually carry dialogue as the main character in that scene? Crucially, the template is that no scene, no conversation, should take place without one or more facets of the First Golden Rule; and if only minor characters are in that conversation, that is unlikely to be so to any degree.

Kitchen Table Exercise Five

Take any piece of writing you are working on, or any you have completed. Look through it, to check to see who  is driving any dialogue and whether they are an essential character. If you find any dubious conversations, ask yourself; does this work? Do I need to re-evaluate the need for this conversation? Is the dialogue going to hold a reader? Does it follow Golden Rule One?______________________

Golden Rule Six:

How speech tabs should be used

Careful handling in the use of ‘tabs’ – the ‘he/she saids’ of dialogue – will really help your dialogue to have a great rhythm and flow. .

 

Tags are the verbal additions that describe who/how the dialogue functions. They are sometimes very hard to get just right. The secret is to use ‘said’ as much as you possibly can. This is because it is almost invisible and readers skip over it. It is a functional necessity that does its job like a postman...never really seen. 

If you can get rid of a tag altogether, that often creates fast-past dialogue – very useful if the scene is also fast-paced.  Also try to break up the tabs by using actions to get a good rhythmic flow… ‘It think it’s time,’ Simon took a sip of his espresso, ‘to talk about the contract.’  By sticking to ‘said’, you will avoid overuse of other tag verbs (muttered, added, chattered, etc).The less you use, the smoother and more readable will your work be; even the most common tags (asked, called, whispered etc), should be cherry-picked; try not to have more than a couple in any patch of dialogue. Some verbs should never be used because they don’t function well as tags at all – laughed is the most common of those...it is almost impossible to laugh and talk at the same time. Chuckle and smiled can be ‘got away with’ but constantly check that certain characters don’t spend all their time smiling as they speak, for instance. Oh, and don't ruin all that good 'tab' work by adding an adverb. Don't tell us the character said something 'bravely'; show us that bravery through the words they use. 

Kitchen Table Exercise Six

Spend ten minutes writing a new conversation between two old characters. Perhaps these characters have never met in your previous fiction, or maybe they are already aware of each other. Whichever scenario you chose, make sure this is new dialogue. Free write the conversation first. Then read through it. How did you use speech tabs? Are you already an old hand at getting the dialogue rhythm right with a varied amount of tabs, no tabs, action instead of tabs? Do you mostly stick to 'said'?

Golden Rule Seven:

Dialogue should be brief and clear. fascinating and multi-tasked. 

Brief and clear. Make sure you keep in control of what comes out of character’s mouths. As it progresses, dialogue must take the reader by the hand, and lead their thoughts in the direction you the writer want them to go. This is why it must never ramble away from the point it’s trying to make, even in an attempt to enhance any of the golden rule. Keep conversation tightly on the subject in hand

At almost no stage of your writing should any character speak for more than three or four lines. That is not to say that this character might have a longer speech to give, and yes, they can give it, but they should be interrupted in various ways. Try to allow the dialogue to be visual so we can see the characters as they speak, breaking up the speech patterns with action, interior thought processes, description of character, etc.  But it must never ‘feel’ broken up. To achieve this, create a rhythm to the dialogue sections, a feel that has a lyrical sensation. Avoid repeated beginnings, and break down repetitive ‘tab’ patterns that might annoy a reader. 

Fascinating.  Even if the personality you’ve given your character is dull, their speech should not be. If your reader wants to listen to inane speech, they can tune into a TV chat show! Real conversation is pedestrian or repetitive at times because we have to think on our feet while talking. But characters should stand out on the page, and in the same way their dialogue should be larger (although never more grandiose), than real conversation. Characters (or rather their writer) have the luxury of something the rest of us do not have – the chance to think through what they say and say exactly what they mean (presuming they intend to say what they mean...). Polish and buff their speech to create fascinating dialogue.

Multi-tasked. Multi-tasking in dialogue writing is the major area where real conversation alters significantly from dialogue in fiction. It should constantly be focused on that first golden rule – all dialogue should further the story in at least one way from that list – if you can make that two, or three, you are beginning to understand how to multi-task your dialogue. Don’t just let conversations enrich developing characters, make it move the plot along and further its complexities at the same time. And although not every conversation is going to crank up the pace or enhance the theme of the story, make sure some dialogue achieves this – especially towards the end of a short story and at least half way through a novel. Part of this ‘cranking up’ may also reflect emotions, etc into good measure.

Kitchen Table Exercise Seven. 

Tap into your writer’s imagination by imagining dialogue when you're not at your writing stations Tune in to your character’s conversations. You may find what they say when they think you are out of earshot will surprise you and add richness to your story

While you are still learning your writing trade, it does not harm to check the golden rules each time you’ve created dialogue, especially when this is a longer chunk of conversation between characters, because this can feel a very complex aspect of writing creatively. 

But remember, your first draft does not have to be perfect. You can continue to experiment with dialogue, change it and allow it to grow.

A Catch-up of Fiction Today. 7 novels that novelist can learn from.

 

I was really lucky; my final proof reading of the new Shaman Mystery was last month. As this fourth book about the incorrigible Sabbie Dare is set in February, I was able to soak up all those drear February experiences – the perpetual rain, the sudden moments of sun, the deep frosts, the dark evenings. 

Through the Floodgate opens in early December 2014, when across the the Southwest, dramatic storms began. On the Somerset Levels, where Sabbie Dare lives, floods were threatening to yet again wreck farmland and villages. The first chapter shows the secret meeting between two feuding farmers, the torrential rain not able to dampen their anger and hate. 

When Sabbie picks up the story, at the end of January,  the floods are beginning to recede. A car is revealed beneath the floodwaters in a Somerset valley...Harper's Coombe.  Many vehicles were 'drowned' in the 2014 Somerset floods, but this one contained a dark secret. A man, dead before the floods overcame his car. And lying next to him, a shotgun.

    It seemed the saddest occurrence of the all the sadness of the devastation. According to bulletins, he was named as John Spicer. He had parked miles from his prosperous farm and big family, and shot himself in the head. 

    He must have chosen it as a quiet spot and driven there through the rain, too wrecked in his life to want to go on with it. He’d stuck a shotgun in his mouth. Not a cry for help – he knew he would die. Then, as the waters rose, he floated inside his car, like spacemen float around their cabin, alone, undiscovered, the murky waters covering him as if he was a burial at sea, the car a coffin. 

 Sabbie is thinking about John Spicer because she's at the funeral of a childhood friend. Kerry, who she knew as a child when she lived at the Willows Children's Home, had thrown herself from the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

 In this latest episode in Sabbie's life, I will explore the darkness that surrounds suicide, the darkness that pervades sexual abuse, and the way natural catastrophes can wreak havoc on the farming community.

But writing should never stop you reading, in fact, it is the most important and useful method of developing as a writer. I'm going to look at seven books I've read since the pandemic has locked us down at home. All of them are very different, but they have all helped me write and rewrite.  Because the shops are shut, they came into my possession in a variety of ways; I collected an armful from charity shops, and a pile from the library before it closed. I filched a couple from a 'free books' shelf outside my village hall, people have kindly given me books, and I ordered one from the net. This was a motley collection and the reading generated a diversity of reactions from me. Here are seven, in order from most disliked to most loved. 

Being Dead, by Jim Crace

Jim Crace  is known for slightly off-beam...okay, slightly weird stories. His Harvest is a favourite of mine, a gripping tale set in a quasi-medieval village. But Being Dead left me as cold as the two main characters, who are dead within a page or two of the opening. We watch them decompose, after an opportunist thief kills them to steal the little they have brought with them to make love in the dunes beside the beach they met on, thirty-odd years ago. They are not all that likeable, in life or death, and I might have given up   entirely, had it not be

The Lonely by Andrew Michael Hurley

Atmospheric and brilliantly described, the landscape of this book supports a slow-burning story that takes you into dark places. Two brothers, one almost fully responsible for the other, discover that the grown-up world they are both almost part of is bleaker and more disturbing than they could have imaginined. I do feel that the story would have told better if we'd moved between the present day (where they're older and wiser) and the past; the visit to The Lonely to heal Andrew, the older brother.

Akin,  by Emma Donaghue 

I’d been gifted the very beautiful hardback copy of this book, with its slightly Art Deco cover depicting Nice on the Cote D’Azure. I’ve already read two books by Donaghue; Room, and The Wonder. These two books are as different as a pea is to a pod, and I was not disappointed to discover that everything about Akin is different to those earlier novels.

I was drawn to the book because I know Nice well, I have family just along the coast, but it was the moment I read the blurb on the flyleaf that I knew I would not be able to put this book down. Who could resist this; A retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own mother’s wartime secrets.

As you leaf through the frontispieces, towards the first chapter, you come across the dictionary definition of ‘akin’, and also several very grainy black-and-white snapshot pictures. A grand Nice building, a strange symbol, a couple on a park bench, snapped from behind. What these mean is revealed steadily as you read into the book.

Noah Sevaggio is eighty next week. He’s never been back to the city where he was born, and in the past few years he’s lost his entire family; his brilliant wife, Joan, his sister and brother-in-law and even their son, Victor, who died of a drug overdose in his twenties. Eleven-year-old Michael is Victor’s son, and has been living with his granny since his mother, Amber, was thrown into jail for selling drugs. Now Granny has died and Michael has no-one.

Of course Noah is talked into taking on this child. Michael is savvy and streetwise and battered by a young life of hardcore experience, deprived of almost everything Noah would hold as needful for an upbringing. He’s full of suppressed anger and blatant cheek, with a mouth chocked with swearwords Noah didn’t know even existed. He’s had little education, but he’s smart. Noah trails him around Nice, so that we can also enjoy getting immersed in its seascape, its sounds and landmarks, its smells and tases. They are searching out the past of Noah’s mother’s final years in the city, after she’d packed Noah and his father off to the US.They use the grainy photos he’d found in her effects and Micheal becomes as keen on the quest as his great-uncle. 

‘All Noah was attempting to do was fill a gap, throw his ungainly self down so the kid could ross over this abyss. Weren’t all of us bridges for each other one way or another?…And then it struck him that it was really the other way around. This boy was saving Noah. Rescuing him from the trap of habit, the bleak tedium of counting sown the year of his retirement. Michael was the little ark, crazily bobbing, in which one lucky old man could go voyaging. 

A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better by Benjamin Wood  

The book starts off like any family drama, a steady rise in tension showing the aftermath of a family break-up. I imagined it would be about a twelve-year-old boy's assent into manhood, where he learns the facts of growing up by taking a trip with his estranged father. ‘I believed my father was a good man, somebody whose blood was fit to share.’ That might have been clue enough that things were going to take a dreadful turn. Wood  breaks a well-known rule…never tell the reader what is going to happen at the start of the story… with the words; As we drove off, [Mum] was smiling at herself, a limp hand spread across her heart. It was the last I ever saw of her. What’s the writer doing? I had to ask. This is a dangerous tactic, only to be used when you’re hugely confident it’s the right approach. By the time I was a third into the novel, I could see his rational. The gentle, steady incline up the tension stakes was tempered with vulnerability. They’re heading towards the Lake District, but as the story moves through this beautiful landscape, it becomes a place of blood and terror, it’s beauty is replaced by a ragged, tattered, chaotic, menace. The seedy pub, the rusty gates, the cluttered interior of the Volvo’s boot. No one is going to fully survive this story, and for a while I was sure Dan would be one of those who would perish at his father’s hands. 

The Beekeeper of Alepo by  Christy Lefteri 

Lefteri, herself a child of Cypriot refugees, volunteered in a Greek refugee centre during the Syrian crisis, then came home to London and wrote this book. Nuri, a Syrian beekeeper, and his wife Afra, an artist blinded when their small son is killed as a bomb lands in their back garden take a hazardous route across Turkey and Greece to find safety in the U.K. The novel moves betweenether this journey that starting in Aleppo in 2015 and the other from England the following year, where they are applying for asylum. Nuri and Afra manage to escape their shattered hometown, but they bring with them memories that haunt them. Nuri thinks, as they travel, wait and apply, that it's his wife who is the broken one of the two. He has no idea that he is suffering silently from PTS. 'You are lost in the darkness,' Afra says to Nuri. He still has his love of beekeeping and Afra still has a gift for art, and we get deep into their thoughts, indeed their souls, helping readers to understand experiences they will luckily never have. 

The Past by Tessa Hadley   

I love Hadley's writing, and so I should as she was one of my mentors on the MA in creative  writing at Bath Spa University. Each of her novels allows for a steady and subtle exploration of very ordinary people…albeit mostly middle class ordinary people…who hardly know, at the start of the stories, what hidden depths they actually possess. In The Past, a family of four siblings arrive at their dilapidated family home, to talk about selling it.  There’s a lot of them in this former rectory, but they squeeze in and proceed to do anything but talk about selling the house. The teenagers make love, the unwelcome new in-law makes a friend of one of the three sisters. Another sister tries to face up to what she thinks is her failed life and the third has no idea what her two children are up to…they have found a dead dog in a ruined cottage…and they know who it once belonged to. As we move towards the climax, there is attempted suicide by a deep river and a devastating fire. Nobody dies, but as the past is revived, everyone changes.                

The Little Red Books by Edna O'Brien.
This book has been feted by the literati and reviewers world wide, and rightly too. It has a mythical feel from the start, but is overlaid with comedy, tragedy, horror, history and realism. It has a wide panorama which starts in a tiny village in Ireland Cloonoila, , with its priest, its nuns, its housewives and its gossipy pub and posh hotel. But it spreads out, to Bosnia, London and finally to the Haig, where the Bosnian war criminal, Dr. Vladimir Dragan, based on Radovan Karadžić. It has wide-ranging themes, but the most clearly portrayed is that of exile; immigration and asylum, focusing first on the workers at the posh hotel, one of whom, soon recognise Dr Vlad and is terrified. Through the story walks Fidelma, the draper's wife, who falls badly for the sexy Vlad, and hopes he will give her the child she's failed to have with her weary husband. She get pregnant, Vlad gets arrested, she gets bloodily attacked by his Serbian followers. Some of this book is shockingly hard to read, and it's as though, at eight-five, O'Brien has decided to pull out all the stops, employing many styles of writing and many structures of plotting. The book is full of interiors, with a lot of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, as well as a lot of pulling-back from close narrative perspectives, so that we feel as if we are soaring over countries to see violence, disregard, and strong ethical actions in equal measure across Europe. This is a must-read for anyone who loves books that really want to tell you something about our world, and are not afraid to do so.