‘Tell Me’ by Colm O’Gaora

‘Somehow, despite his denials, I knew that my father and I had been this way before’.

O’Gaora’s story of an adult son being shown the now abandoned home of his father’s lover is full of a sense of place, and is a helpful way to show pupils how description can deepen a story. It is all about suggestion – in that old formula, showing rather than telling. I like it especially for its ending, which shows how a story does not have to be explicit:

‘I turned back to face my father, and caught the trailing edge of that last cloud drifting across his face.
“Tell me,” I said.
And he did.

From Giving Ground, Jonathan Cape, 1993