Short stories: Life-changing moments

On a recent Guardian podcast, Chris Power — who has written a short story column in the Guardian for a decade — recognises the tendency of reviews of the form to begin with ‘an obligatory paragraph on “The Short Story” in capital letters, rather than talking about the work’. Power’s debut collection is itself a love letter to the form, a survey of it and the culmination of a life’s studious interest. So talking about the work itself doubles as a precis of ‘The Short Story’ and its moment.

Happening around the world — often engaged with travelling itself — the ten stories in Mothers take the form’s austerity and turn it into something from which restless characters seek to escape. Eva, a troubled Swedish woman who appears in three stories, exerts a pressure on all the others. They are often skillfully claustrophobic and tense. In ‘The Crossing’, a darkly comic, crafty tale, a woman has an unsatisfactory weekend of sex and hiking with a potential new partner. After she teases her date for not taking a daring route over a river, he feels the need to prove himself and falls to his death.

Someone spends a story worrying that his partner is going to leave him, and she does. A rootless young man decides to go to Mexico and stop a wedding. He is roundly humiliated as he discovers he has been the plaything of both bride and groom: ‘Realisation unfurled in Liam, like a flag catching the wind.’

While being oblique, most of the stories in Mothers follow this staple of short story convention. They are built around life-altering but simple realisations: a change in atmosphere or moment of acceptance; the locating of a point at which a person’s options diverged and potential lives went unlived.