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This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A man builds a tree house by a river, in anticipation of the coming flood. A sugar-beet crashes through a young woman's windscreen. A boy sets fire to a barn. A pair of itinerant labourers sit by a lake, talking about shovels and sex, while fighter-planes fly low overhead and prepare for war.

These aren't the sort of things you imagine happening to someone like you. But sometimes they do.

Set in the flat and threatened fenland landscape, where the sky is dominant and the sea lurks just beyond the horizon, these delicate, dangerous, and sometimes deeply funny stories tell of things buried and unearthed, of familiar places made strange, and of lives where much is hidden, much is at risk, and tender moments are hard-won.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 6, 2012
      This debut collection by Bermuda native and Man Booker Prize–nominee McGregor (If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things) comprises 30 stories roughly organized by their various British settings. The book includes a few perhaps too-clever experimental short forms mixed with longer traditional stories, which rise to the top as the book’s better reads. “In Winter the Sky” juxtaposes free verse narrative poems penned by Joanna and the prose narrative of how she and her husband, George, struggle to profitably operate their family farm. The collection’s plum is the ironic, eerie “Wires,” where university student Emily Wilkinson’s windshield is smashed by a lone sugar beet flying off the back of an open lorry. Rescued by two dubiously chivalrous men, Emily is too busy worrying about breaking up with her ill-tempered boyfriend to sense the danger in her current predicament. The majority of these tales—like the delightfully surreal antiwar satire, “I’ll Buy You a Shovel”—are full of quirky characters and accessible enough to hold general readers’ interest, while the other pieces will entice fans of experimental literary fiction. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency.

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  • English

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