The Fairground Magician: Short Stories

‘'It's not that I need you to love me, but I need to suffer because you don't.''

I am a rather weird person. Strange things have the power to move me to the point of tears. The sweet purple and blue of the sky in the midst of concrete terraces, poetry married to orgiastic urbanism. There is a strange beauty in urban areas, after all. This collection brought back quiet memories of serene moments. Me sitting with a book in my grandma's beautiful garden with its trees and cats, not to mention an old well that had always perplexed me, the absence of sound in a summer noon when everyone tries to find a few moments of peace, the afternoon coffee, the humidity of a summer evening. This collection is the poetry of summer, the eroticism of our wishes, the doubts and the confessions.

It Could Have Been Me: What would our life be like if we could become the person we admire?

Love Me Tender: A woman spends her birthday contemplating her past and her marriage.

Fairground Magician: A story about extreme longing and obsession.

Zugzwang: Two sisters find themselves in the middle of a strange game of longing and fulfilment.

Aurora Borealis: A father who has experienced the most terrifying nightmare for a parent tries to find a way through absolute pain and takes us back to the day he lost everything.

Nosedive: How can you cope when your life is about to change forever?

Wanderings: A couple argues about their male cat. A story full of symbolism and the quiet solitude of a summer garden.

Pockets Full Of Stones: The pain of betrayal, the fight to carry on without the one your heart had chosen without asking you. It never does, does it?

Senka: The return of a brother prompts our narrator to reminisce on his family and his quiet wife. I adored this story.

Sky: The voice of an extra-terrestrial being that is on the verge of becoming an extremely incomplete human.

Ophelia, Get Thee to a Nunnery: A hilarious, yet poignant, exposition of the way women are often treated in Literature and Art. You are either a whore or a nun. If you are the one, deep down you wish you were the other. Men decide and you have no say. So...a nunnery.

Snickers: The whispers - or screams - of writing the perfect story, capturing the perfect idea.

Under the Guise of Highbrow Literature: A moving story of young love torn apart by circumstance, Literature, and reconciling with the past.

Do yourselves a favour and read this gem.

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/