I enjoy short stories, especially when they are well-written. Alice Munro is a master of her art. Her The Moons of Jupiter has no unexpected twists. It is simply a very evocative collection of insights into human relationships.

Take, for example, the final and title story of the volume. Munro writes as though this is a real memory of her final days with her father, when he was diagnosed as having a worn-out heart valve and admitted to a Toronto hospital, finally deciding to go ahead with a replacement operation.

However, in a self-searching introduction, Munro tells us that her stories, though frequently based on incidents or memories of parts of her life, are not totally autobiographical.

With occasional sorties (for example to Queensland in Bardon Bus) we move around Canada in the stories and, for example, visit the Maritime provinces in Dulse when the protagonist, Lydia, spends an evening with a group of men in a guest house, three of them cable-layers for a telephone company and one an elderly gentleman who has a passion for Willa Cather. The gift of a packet of dulse to Lydia is the key moment of the story.

These are fulfilling and entertaining cameos, written in Alice Munro’s flawless style.

Eowyn Ivey takes us back into the twenties when a childless couple, escaping from the misery of perpetually being reminded of their heartbreak, create a homestead in the wild frontier of Alaska.

After a year of struggle when Mabel is contemplating drowning herself in the Wolverine River, the first snows arrive and, in an unexpected light-hearted moment, they sculpt a snow girl for themselves.

A Russian legend is inter-twined with the story: Arthur Ransome’s Little Daughter of the Snow (a version of Snegurochka) leads us to expect this mysterious little girl who moves into their lives to melt and disappear.

With Jack and Mabel, we begin to love little Faina and watch her come and go with the snow, all the time, expecting her final disappearance. Their adopted heir, Garrett, who hunts and traps in the Alaskan wilderness, learns to love Faina, too and longs to create a future with her.

The harsh, yet beautiful Alaskan environment is evocatively recreated for the reader with the struggle homesteaders had to eke a living out of the unyielding land.

This enchanting story is a lovely flight of fancy and a delightful read.

Short of something to read, I picked an old favourite off the shelf and was delighted to return to such well-written stories. Penelope Lively‘s Pack of Cards is her collected short stories written between 1978 and 1986. Good heavens! Some of those are over thirty years old, yet they still raise an amused smile or a smothered giggle and sometimes almost a tear.

My favourite in the collection is A Long Night at Abu Simbel. We remember that Penelope Lively was raised in Egypt when we meet this disgruntled pack of middle-aged and elderly tourists grumbling and inward-looking and making a misery of the life of their young guide, Julia. Night has fallen by the time that they realize that she has abandoned them. They are left to manage as best they can in a very primitive airport lounge. One elderly man ‘dies’ – not very funny, yet the story is amusing from beginning to end.

We meet a young boy visiting his future prep school in Next term, We’ll Mash You and we truly feel his trepidation.

Help takes us into a rather unsatisfactory marriage where a domineering husband browbeats his incompetent wife into engaging a woman to help her. The house begins to run like clockwork but money mysteriously disappears.

Party follows two developing parties; the adults over-indulging in alcohol and the youngsters in we-are-never-told-exactly-what. Only the eleven-year-old and the granny seem to rise above the general decline into incoherence.

There isn’t one disappointing story in the entire collection!

Arundhati Roy‘s The God of Small Things evokes the Kerala region of India so effectively that the reader has a permanent image of rushing rivers, Syrian Christians, lush vegetation with fruit crops, ants, and families involved in the fruit industry.

I was delighted to be taken into the same area and environment by Susan Visvanathan’s short stories in Something barely remembered. A similar series of patriarchal families is introduced and a succession of disenchanted women who move to Rome, Casablanca, Zurich or the USA.

Sadness intrudes into the stories. A doctor collecting herbs stays overnight with a father and young girl who is unwilling to admit that her mother has run away. Later we meet the mother but we are left wondering whether the small girl who was drowned, as Chako left the village, was her daughter.

We meet Mariam, whose relationship with Paolo was destroyed when she failed to obey his instructions and was briefly kidnapped in Casablanca. The satisfactory aspect of these short stories is that, although they are fragments, we meet the same characters again in a later event and are able to build a picture of the tiny commune of Puthenkavu.

I believe Alexander McCall Smith is more familiar for his The No 1 ladies’ Detective Agency series than as a writer of short stories. However, Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations is just as delightful as his series of Botswana detective stories.

I rarely laugh out loud when reading but am having to ration myself to one story a day as these are causing so may ecstatic guffaws.

Last night’s story was Far North. You might not find it very amusing to read about Bill Jameson being devoured by crocodiles when he had climbed into their pen to retrieve a crocodile skin passport holder embossed with ‘Godsown’ (This story takes place in Cairns). His date of the day didn’t find it very amusing either, when an eight-year old witness claimed he had seen her push him. She had, indeed, been thoroughly bored by her date.

All the same, the story is told in such sparkling prose that there is a laugh a minute. The end is just the sort of ending such a story should have.

Each of these tales presents an unusual date. Fat Date presents us with two rather large people who have dated through an agency. Of course, the easiest way he can offend her is to suggest that she is large – but there is a lovely denouement when Edgar becomes wedged in his chair. The last five lines of the story are a magnificent punch line.

There are nine short stories in all and all are equally enjoyable.

Over a million copies of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin have been sold and a film made, and indeed, it is easy to see why.

The reader is drawn into what is, in effect, a thriller. We hear only the voice of Kevin’s mother as she writes to Franklin, her apparently estranged husband, in the period after Kevin’s high school massacre. We ask ourselves why he never replies. We are shocked by the dislike she has felt for her son, Kevin, from his birth, but the problem of of why Kevin resorts to a massacre in the gymnasium is never resolved for us.

We cannot condone Franklin’s optimistic conviction that his family life is happy and that Kevin is a normal mischievous child but is Kevin a sociopath? We rarely see even a glimmer of normal human responses in the picture of Kevin painted by Eva.

Incidents like his using drain cleaner to clean his small sister’s eye (leading to the loss of her eye) and his deliberate destruction of Eva’s studio lead us to question whether Kevin is born totally evil. Kevin’s only explanation of his ‘high school massacre’ is that he is providing the excitement that people require. This raises unpleasant questions for the reader.

Right up to the final gruesome revelation, We Need to Talk about Kevin is an extremely disturbing text.

Aimée Bender‘s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake reminded me of Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. The linking of food to emotions is a very evocative way of writing.

Rose Edelstein, just before her ninth birthday, bites into a chocolate lemon cake and finds that she is reading the emotions of her mother who has made it for her birthday. Her mother’s trembling marriage relationship is revealed and, as the talent develops, Rose is able to recognise the affair with Larry that replaces the aging and desperate relationship with her husband.

The gift gives Rose no pleasure as she reads the minds of suppliers of food in stores, canteens and restaurants. We, the readers, are aware that Rose is not the only ‘different’ person in the family as we watch her almost autistic brother pursuing his scientific passion to the point where he is disappearing for long periods of time.

Only George, her brother’s generous and supportive friend, gives Rose the love and understanding that she needs to cope with her outlandish gift, but we, with Rose, sadly attend his marriage to someone else.

This is an engaging and moving novel that works towards the conclusion that the readers have been expecting.

I found this little novel, translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent, very disturbing.  There is a large store of holocaust literature. Primo Levi’s If This is a Man comes instantly to mind, as does William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and Fania  Fenelon’s The Musicians of Auschwitz dealt with the theme of music in the concentration camps. When a new novel like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas or this work, The Auschwitz Violin, appears on the shelves (it was published in Catalan in 1994 but the English translation has just appeared) I wonder why the theme still haunts authors.

Daniel in the novel, is a luthist and he is given the task of crafting a violin in the camp workshop. He learns from his friend in the camp that an evil wager has been agreed upon between the camp Kommandant and the camp doctor. A crate of claret will be handed over if Daniel succeeds within the agreed time. Daniel himself will be handed over for medical experiments should he fail.

Each chapter begins with real documents that recall for the readers the inhumanity of the concentration camp system. Encompassing the story is a further dimension, we learn of the progression of the violin into the hands of Daniel’s ‘daughter’ when Bronislaw, who survived the camp, recognises the beautiful tone of the violin played by the first violinist at a concert.

Looking for something different to read over Christmas, I found the Penguin Great Ideas Series. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, and The House of the Dead are number 74 in the series that has works like Swift’s The Tale of the Tub, Thomas More’s Utopia, and Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

I was moved and impressed by both the book and the film of Aleksandr Soljenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and it was a surprise to find that this Dostoevsky had written much the same a hundred years earlier. Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years in a prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, for his liberal activities.

The House of the Dead  is a fictional recreation of the time Dostoevsky spent in the Siberian convict prison through his fictionalized narrator, Alekzandr Petrovich Goryanchikov. The extract in the Penguin Great Ideas Series presents the first impressions of the aristocrat, on his arrival in the prison. We meet much the same range of prisoners, the same desperate fights for food and the same human degradation that Soljenitsyn so graphically describes.

It is not a pretty topic but a great read!

I was travelling in Sweden and Linda Olsson’s Astrid and Veronika was recommended as a delightful book that is a top favourite in Sweden. What a moving novel it is.

Astrid is spoken of as a witch by people in the small winter-bound community. She is a recluse, living in the house opposite the one that Veronika rents for the harsh winter season in her attempt to come to terms with the tragedy that has destroyed her hopes.

When illness overtakes Veronika, Astrid discreetly makes contact and nurses the unhappy neighbour. A warm and touching friendship develops between the old lady and her young neighbour, as the seasons change in a beautifully evoked Sweden.

As the two rejoice in their friendship, we, the readers, learn of the frightening and almost love-less past that Astrid has survived, and of her fearful secret. Through Veronika, we live through her recent tragedies.

The outcome of the friendship rounds this enchanting novel off superbly. The writing is flawless. This is a delightful first novel and I can’t wait to get my hands on Linda Olsson’s next one.