Strange Water

This debut collection by acclaimed translator Sarah Moses is rooted as much in sound and language as it is in story. The 75 tiny fictions that populate Strange Water are evocative soundscapes, seascapes, skyscapes, landscapes, often magical and mysterious, sometimes unsettling. Each story is rooted in a single sentence—a dream sentence, a mistake sentence, a sentence uttered when the speaker thought no one was listening—whose tendrils reach into unexpected places. Moses's attention to the individual word and to sound is echoed in her attention to the physical presence of the line on the page. These compressed-to-bursting-point narratives—preoccupied with bad-mannered neighbours, misunderstandings, coincidences and serendipities, dream states, and subtropical climes—take place in constant movement: between languages, between homes, between continents.