Something Wonderful: Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Most Anticipated Book of August at The Millions
From the Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award
“Jo Lloyd has drawn out all the intensity and latent power of short fiction. . . . A major talent.” —Hilary Mantel
“Her sentences could rouse the dead (and do, in this excellent book).” —Karen Russell
In Something Wonderful, prize-winning author Jo Lloyd has crafted nine stories that delight in language and shine with wit, wisdom, and deep humanity. Whether seeking knowledge, riches, or a better life, the characters in this debut collection are united by a quest for lasting value, as they ask how we should treat our world, our work, our selves, and each other in both past and present. A vainglorious mine owner dreams of harnessing all of nature to the machinery of commerce. Two women hunt rare butterflies in a pre-First World War landscape already experiencing the first bites of biodiversity loss. A young man tracks down the father who abandoned him inside a festival exhibit. A rural Welsh community is fascinated and angered by glimpses of its invisible, wealthy neighbors.
Clear-sighted and lyrical, compassionate, and full of truth, Something Wonderful from Jo Lloyd, winner of the BBC National Short Story Award, announces a remarkable new voice with a sensibility all her own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Each story in Lloyd's crisp and layered debut collection is like a picture postcard from the Welsh countryside, belied by family secrets, dashed hopes, and the long shadows of history. In "My Bonny," a widow raises her son after her husband is killed at sea, beginning a family saga that stretches into an ominous future in just a few short pages. The unseen upper-class visitors to a close-knit community leave a mark on its citizens in "The Invisible," and in "Butterflies of the Balkans," set in the run-up to WWI, two young women pursue a passion for lepidopterology. Other stories feature hopeful young people falling in and out of love as they make their first forays into adulthood, as in "Ade/Cindy/Kurt/Me" and "Your Magic Summer"; the latter follows the friendship of two girls as they become women, marry, and find their rapport threatened by the changes in their lives. Perhaps the best entry is the gothic "The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies," wherein the imperious and self-made lord of a humble township ventures into the lowlands, only to meet a mysterious fate. Throughout, the author shows a knack for stretching each germ of a story into a miniature epic. Lloyd's singular talent is on full display.
