Short Stories Aloud – The most fun you can have in a bookshop on a Tuesday night.
About this Event
Listen to actors read short stories read by our guest authors. This month we are joined by David Constantine, author of ‘The Dressing-Up Box’, and Anna Hope, ‘Expectation’ . After hearing short stories (and eating some cake) there will be questions from Sarah Franklin, author of ‘Shelter’, and the audience. Join us for a wonderful evening, not to be missed.
The Dressing-Up Box by David Constantine
Against the backdrop of war, a group of children barricade themselves in an abandoned townhouse, cherishing what’s left of their innocence with the help of a dressing-up box…
A deep-sea diver takes to being suspended for hours at a time on the end of a line not long enough to reach the seabed…
An aging widower moves into the shed at the end of his garden to plan out his ‘endgame’ surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of hoarded curiosities…
The characters in David Constantine’s fifth collection are all in pursuit of sanctuary; the violence and mendacity of the outside world presses in from all sides – be it the ritualised brutality suffered by children at a Catholic orphanage, or the harrowing videos shared among refugees of an atrocity ‘back home’. In each case, the characters withdraw into themselves, sometimes abandoning language altogether, until something breaks and they can retreat no further. In Constantine’s luminous prose, these stories capture such moments in all their clarity; moments when an entire life seems to hang in the balance, the past’s betrayals exposed, its ghosts dragged out into the daylight; moments in which the possibility of defiance and redemption is everything.