Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love

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Another unimpressive story is Foreign Parts, about a British man who is engaged to a Pakistani woman who he finds to be a completely different person in her home country. Firecracker’ and ‘Too much’ particularly shattered my heart and left me vowing to try to never be such a terrible daughter or friend. The two of them bring to the south of France a lifetime of recriminations and resentments, something perfectly ordinary but which manifests in a chillingly extraordinary way at the dramatic end of the story.

Still, from shock to remorse, empathy to hope, each story hits the mark in drawing from the reader a sense of empathy; keeping the door ajar if only to let us glimpse an insight into the sometimes oppressive nature of tradition. The emotions and feelings, and the characters that inhabit the stories resonate, there is a commonality and authenticity that will captivate readers.At times the author tries to go for this realism reminiscent of authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri, but then we also get stories that try to be creepy or fairytalesque but fall short of being either of those things and when compared to the stories of Shirley Jackson or Helen Oyeyemi, well, they didn’t strike me as particularly original or fantastical.

I take occasional digs on here at the hype which pervades Twitter where every book is super fabulous but it has to be said I’m often grateful when a book is flagged I might have otherwise missed.All those experiences— the pain and the beauty of it all, make me appreciate even more the complexities of the lives we live, and how amazing it is when our tangents come to intersect. There are the lies, secrets, despair, love, loneliness, loss, grief and silence that many readers will relate to, particularly as there is a universality that crosses cultural boundaries when it comes to the nature of human relationships, repeating themselves in their many forms throughout our history.