Best British Short Stories 2022

  One of the weakest volumes in the series, filled with stories that felt focused on being gross and shocking, And NOT in a pleasantly literary way. Stories like Sink Rate by David Frankel should come with a tiger warning and I am a sworn enemy to trigger warnings. However, some of us do travel a lot, others have experienced traumatic events related to flights. Why any editor would think this story should be included in the collection is beyond me. Others like RZ Baschir's The Chicken and Will Wiles's The Meat Stream were horrible, unreadable. If these writers have won ‘awards' for their writing, I pity us all contemporary readers.
When you only enjoy 10 out of 20 stories, the omens are not in your favour, right? On the bright side, these 10 stories are easily among the best I've ever read, born out of bold ideas and exceptional writing.
How You Find Yourself (Sara Sherwood): A life narrated in relationships with acute remarks on womanhood and intimacy.
Single Sit (Edward Hogan): The lightning relationship between an employer and an employee, set in the quietly haunting English landscape.
Offcomers (Rosanna Hildyard): In a situation that mirrors the time of the pandemic, a couple (not a father and a daughter as an idiot below would have you believe...) tries to cope with the risks of farming. Except the husband is an absolute brute. Set in the rugged land of Yorkshire.
‘'A window a table a recess with a lamp.A window a table.A moon looking in.''
Square/Recess/Moon (Ben Pester): A brilliant, evocative metaphor for the loneliness and frustrations of modern life. Extraordinarily beautiful writing.
Sarcophagus (Alice M): A woman narrates her thoughts while being in an MRI scan machine.
The Comet (Sonya Moor): A make-up artist narrates her meeting with Simone Veil, the French politician who survived the unimaginable horror of Auschwitz and went on to pass the legalization of abortion in 1975. Moving, poignant, the absolute gem in the collection.
A Visit to the Bonesetter (Christopher Burns): This story scared the living daylights out of me. In a dystopian society, a married couple gets a taste of the authority's desire to eradicate what makes us humans.
An Easement (Paul Mcquade): A new life awaits the lovers of our story, yet new beginnings are seldom pleasant. An atmospheric story set in the rural landscape of the USA.
New To It All (Sean Padraic Birnie): A body horror tale done right. Exquisitely disconcerting.
Wild City (Sophie Mackintosh): A designer returns to a city that has decided to make the transition from urban to rural in a dystopian setting that looks eerily familiar.