‘Love Silk Food’ by Leone Ross

I was first introduced to Leone Ross because Alice Slater commissioned her to write a short story for Outsiders. Her recent novel, This One Sky Day, published by Faber (and titled Popisho in the US) is a marvel. Ross is a very humane writer who is very skilled at capturing small moments between people. I picked this story mainly because of how it conveys London lives. In it, a woman, whose philandering husband and grown children disappoint her, meets a man on the tube and helps him find his daughter’s house in Wood Green. It is a small moment but it is also big. Like Shirley Jackson in ‘The Witch’, Ross has captured the uniqueness of an interaction on public transport. Those minutes with a stranger captured in a few pages, that will be remembered years later.

First published in Wasafiri Magazine in 2010 and collected in Come Let Us Sing Anyway, Peepal Tree, 2017