Collections
Stories deal with the feminist daughter of wealthy parents, an English banker and his wife who vacation in Florida, a disillusioned actor, and a blind man's remarriage
Evangelista's Fan and Other Stories Tremain, Rose
A wonderful new collection of short stories, most of which are published here for the first time. Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American woman for whom Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, ended her life (as the Duchess of Windsor) as the prisoner of her lawyer who would not allow anyone — friend, foe or journalist — to visit her in her Paris flat. Rose Tremain takes this true story and transforms it into an imaginative and ironic fiction. Her thesis is that Wallis, gaga and bed-ridden, had forgotten the king who gave up an empire for love of her. This superb story plays with the selectiveness of memory: why does Wallis recall the seemingly unimportant, while forgetting the glory days of her notoriety? She can remember her first two husbands — one a bit of a brute, the other very boring — but not the world-famous third one. The other stories in this magnificent collection range over a variety of themes, equally original and unexpected: an East German border guard, redundant after the Berlin Wall comes down in 1989, imagines that he might still have a purpose in life. He tries to reach Russia by bicycling across the hostile wastes of Poland. A jilted man gets his revenge. A baby grows wings. A character in an Impressionist painting escapes from his “frame” — or does he? And there’s a Christmas story set in a seedy hotel. From the Hardcover edition.
Rose Tremain's fiction often finds itself drawn into the 'wide skies and watery byways' of East Anglia. The short stories gathered in Wildtrack, selected from her collections published over three decades, convey the sense of isolation, darkness and secrecy the region fosters: a sense that has long fired Tremain's imagination. At first sight, these four stories might seem to have little in common apart from their East Anglian settings. But some of the protagonists also share a feeling of anxiety that there is something wrong or missing in their lives which they must confront. The title story, Wildtrack, and Peerless both tackle the question of how we find meaning in a secular life, while in A Shooting Season, the main character believes she has found a safe haven, free from intervention of any kind but then The Past makes an appearance.
These short stories deal with ideas about mutability, improvement and escape into new worlds, and involve characters who constantly fail to understand themselves or anyone else. They also celebrate the small success or fragment of knowledge which can contribute to a person's experience of life.
A seductive new collection from the author of “varied, engrossing, and . . . astonishing” fiction (Richard Eder, Boston Globe ). Trapped in a London apartment, Beth remembers a transgressive love affair in 1960s Paris. The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster’s cottage, miles from Moscow. A young woman who is about to marry a rich aristocrat instead begins a torrid relationship with a construction worker. A father, finally free of his daughter’s demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat. A middle-aged woman cares for her injured mother at Christmas. And in the grandest house of all, Danni the Polish housekeeper catches the eye of an enigmatic visitor, Daphne du Maurier. Rose Tremain awakens the senses in this magnificent and diverse collection of short stories. In her precise yet sensuous style, she lays bare the soul of her characters―the admirable, the embarrassing, the unfulfilled, the sexy, and the adorable―to uncover a dazzling range of human emotions and desires.