Love’s myriad forms

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body & Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) takes a confident straddle across speculative fiction, erotica, fable and horror. In these electric stories, the author explores the challenges and promises of women’s bodies with forceful verve.

In ‘Real Women Have Bodies’, a mysterious illness makes women gradually fade away; many of them ask a seamstress to stitch their disappearing bodies into the fabric of dresses. In ‘The Husband Stitch’, a woman gives herself completely to her husband and son, insisting only that they never touch the ribbon she always wears around her neck. When this tiny privacy is not permitted, we see just how much unravels. ‘Eight Bites’ shows a large woman following her sisters in undergoing bariatric surgery to curb her appetite: ‘They ordered large meals and then said, “I couldn’t possibly”… that bashful lie had been converted into truth vis-à-vis a medical procedure.’ Although the collection is a little uneven, the best of these stories — with resonant imaginative worlds and intelligent riffs on a woman’s place — are spellbinding.

In The Reservoir Tapes (Fourth Estate, £9.99) Jon McGregor returns to the Peak District village of his Booker-longlisted novel Reservoir 13. Both books revolve around the unexplained disappearance of 13-year-old Becky Shaw, which the author uses as a peg to reveal the intricate goings on of village life, thick with secrets. The first of these stories, ‘Charlotte’, is a feat — an interview redacted so that only the interviewer’s words are given. Charlotte is the missing girl’s mother, and her mute discomfort is conjured as the interviewer puts words into her mouth in this ‘chance for you to put your side of the story’. The other stories are told in McGregor’s skilful focalised third person, each one centred on a different character. As in Reservoir 13, all the ‘he saids’ and ‘she saids’ jostle each other to show the disparity in voices and perspectives.