All the Beloved Ghosts
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
An acutely observed, evocative collection of short stories blending fiction, biography, and memoir--from a Booker-longlisted author.
Evocative, sensual, and tender, these stories confront our reality culture and interrogate our relationship with iconic figures, coming to life at the boundary between reality and fiction.
A woman emerging from mourning spends her savings on a fur coat, a coat she will wear to a dance that will change her life. A professor of cardiovascular physiology lingers on the cusp of consciousness as he waits for his new heart to be delivered, still beating, from another body--and is carried on a tidal wave of memories to an attic room half a century ago. Visiting Sylvia Plath's grave in Yorkshire, the author imagines a conversation with the poet, a fellow North American who settled in grey England. She reflects on the treasured photograph of Princess Diana she took as a teenager, one of a multitude taken during a life cut short. And at Charleston, Angelica Garnett, child of the Bloomsbury group, is overpowered by echoes of the past; by all the beloved ghosts that spring to life before her eyes.
MacLeod's characters hover on the border of life and death, where memory is most vivid and the present most elusive. Moving from the London riots of 2011 to 1920s Nova Scotia, from Oscar Wilde's grave to the Brighton Pier, these exquisitely formed stories capture the small tragedies and profound truths of existence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MacLeod's (Unexploded) collection of stories deftly blends fiction and facts, memory and biography, to delve into the precarious nature of human life. The ghosts here are not literal except, perhaps, in the mind of one elderly character from the title story and one brief appearance by the late Sylvia Plath. Instead, the visitations of supernatural and fantastic beings in MacLeod's hands are suggestive of haunting memories and the traces that harrowing experiences leave behind. In "The Thaw," a girl attends a town dance and on that night of horrific tragedy, has the time of her life. In "The Heart of Denis Noble" a cardiovascular surgeon prepping for heart surgery has flashbacks to his younger days, his first breakthrough research on heart conditions, and the hard lessons he has learned about the vagaries of love. In "There Are Precious Things" the lives of people traveling in a subway car a single mother worried about her job, a nun on leave to get a hearing aid, a man with Alzheimer's, among others are examined. In "Dreaming Diana: Twelve Frames," the short life and widely controversial death of Princess Diana are revisited by a fan. Finely layered and often teasingly opaque, MacLeod's captivating book of stories presents a diverse array of voices, each as particular as the last.
