The Pier Falls
And Other Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The dazzling first short story collection from the acclaimed, best-selling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
The tales in The Pier Falls, Mark Haddon's lyrical and uncompromising short story collection, take many forms—Victorian adventure story, science fiction, morality tale, contemporary realism—but all of them showcase his immense gifts of invention and penetrating insight. In these pages, a boy's life is marked by the afternoon he encounters a semiautomatic pistol belonging to his friend's older brother; a Greek princess is abandoned on an island by her abductor; a group of adventurers travel deep into the Amazonian jungle but discover the gravest danger lurking among their own number; and a woman wonders whether she has chosen to travel to Mars only to escape the entanglement of human relationships back here on Earth. Drawing inventively from history, myth, fairy tales, and, above all, the deep well of empathy that made his acclaimed novels so compelling, The Pier Falls reveals a previously unseen side of the celebrated author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Haddon's (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) collection of nine short stories is a m lange of acutely observed domestic dramas and bizarre tales of life in outer space, ancient Greece, and a trip to a remote corner of the globe to retrieve a lost explorer. Highlights include "Bunny," which recounts the story of a 27-year-old man who weighs 518 lbs. due to his addiction to junk food; "Breathe," the story of a woman who returns to England from her expatriate life in California to face the relics of her desiccated family; and "Wodwo," which combines family holiday-time melodrama with the appearance of a strange man who may be a character straight out of British folklore. "The Island," about a princess who finds herself left on an island, and the titular "The Pier Falls," which calmly recounts a seaside disaster, are quietly unrelenting in their descriptions of horror. Subtle strands often serve to connect the stories to one another, whether it's a problematic mother or the smell of ammonia on someone's dying breath. Though each story is beautifully written, Haddon is at his best when capturing the peculiarly dark, British mirth that accompanies disaster.
