Category: Sarah Turner

Sarah Turner’s short stories have been published by journals including: The Rumpus, The Sonora Review, J Journal, Shooter Literary Magazine, Fictive Dream and The London Magazine and she has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize Short Story Award. She studied English at Oxford and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Some of her published fiction can be read at www.scturnerfiction.com. As Sarah Rigby, she reviewed for The London Review of Books and the TLS, contributed to The Good Fiction Guide (OUP, ed. Jane Rogers) and edited As I Was Saying Yesterday, a volume of Patricia Beer’s prose (Carcanet Press).

‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, by D. H. Lawrence

I first read this story as a teenager, and still remember how chilling and sad and overwhelmingly realistic I found it. Even now, it often comes to mind unexpectedly, when I’m thinking about something else.

It’s about the family of a Nottinghamshire miner, who spend the early part of the story waiting for him to come home from the pit. All of them, even his young children, suspect that he’s getting drunk on his wages instead of coming home. Resentment builds as they sit looking at the table, which is set for tea, and they eventually begin to eat without him. A kind of domestic contentment is built, despite Elizabeth, the mother’s, tightly repressed anger, which keeps breaking through the surface of their conversation. Earlier, she picked some chrysanthemums, but when her daughter notices and admires them, Elizabeth refutes the idea that they smell beautiful:

“’No,’ she said. ‘Not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I married him and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he had brown chrysanthemums in his buttonhole.’”

I admire the beauty of Lawrence’s prose and his deep understanding of human relationships and the silences that can exist beneath speech and between people. But I think that what I admire most about this story is the way he so closely follows Elizabeth’s emotions, which shift from an anger that’s so powerful she’s unable to hold herself back from telling the children, in brief explosive sentences, that their father is a drunk, to a restless anxiety, and finally to fear, grief, guilt and an overwhelming sense of isolation, without losing their intensity.

First published in The English Review, 1911, collected in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, by D.H. Lawrence, Duckworth, 1914 and in D.H. Lawrence’s Short Stories, Everyman, 1981. Read online here

‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ by Alan Sillitoe

For a while, at school, we read a lot of fiction by writers who were from the north of England, like us. Looking back, it seems inspired to try to introduce teenagers to literature through writing that reflects the landscapes and voices they know best, and I still love a lot of the writers I discovered then, but I enjoy this story especially because I’ve run on and off for most of my life, and its descriptions of the physical and psychological effects of running are some of the best I’ve ever read.

The story is narrated by Smith, a teenage boy who’s been sent to Borstal for theft, but is given an unusual freedom: he’s allowed out three mornings a week so he can practise for the inter-Borstal race the institution’s governor is sure he can win. It’s cold and uncomfortable to set out at 5 am, but he finds that he can think on these runs in a way he can’t at any other time.

His clarity of thought gives him power; he clearly articulates the lack of hope and opportunity in his life and his awareness that he will never be a winner in the system valued by the governor and the kinds of people who watch the race. He does, however, understand that the governor intends to use his almost certain success in the race to bolster his own career, and as he runs, he forms a plan to get his revenge.

The narrator’s description of reaching a stage where he forgets he’s running and is barely aware of his body moving, or the landscape passing and reaches a meditative state where his thoughts are unexpectedly clear and his feelings more powerful resonates with me, and his account of the final race, where the memory of finding his father’s dead body unexpectedly resurfaces and he realises that he can’t control his thoughts while he’s running is deeply emotional, though characteristically understated.

In The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, W. H. Allen & Co., 1958. Read online here

‘First Love, Last Rites’ by Ian McEwan

I first read this story at 17, about the same age as its main characters, and I can remember reading the first page standing by a bookshelf in Manchester Central Library and wandering away to a chair, still reading and completely drawn in, and finishing the whole of it before I left the building.

It’s a dark but involving story that begins with the description of a teenage couple having sex on a table in front of an open window while a hidden animal scratches somewhere in the flat behind them, so faintly the narrator thinks he might have imagined it, and opens up into an intense depiction of their floundering relationship and the pressures of real life that increasingly weigh on them as the summer gets hotter and their flat gets dirtier. The narrative propulsion comes from the narrator’s increasing preoccupation with the rat that’s sharing the flat with them and his desperate attempts first to ignore it and then to catch it.

The description of the narrator’s eventual conflict with the rat is grotesque and horrifying, but there is a strong sense of psychological truth to the story that keeps me coming back to it, years after I first read it. There are deep silences between the characters, and an insistent refusal to acknowledge problems. This is most notable between the narrator and Sissel, his girlfriend, but also occurs in the narrator’s interactions with Sissel’s family, especially with her younger brother, Adrian, who cartwheels and shouts and fights and imitates the noise of machine-guns to avoid acknowledging the increasing tension he feels during his visits to the flat. This deliberate avoidance of emotion recurs so insistently throughout the story and is so brilliantly evoked that I’ve always found it very moving.

Though the growing air of despondency that grows through the story is eventually punctured by a more hopeful note, there’s a strong sense throughout it of summer ending and adolescence being painfully outgrown that’s wistful and tender, and pulls me back each time I reread it.

First published in First Love, Last Rites, Jonathan Cape, 1975. Republished by Picador, 1991

‘The Third and Final Continent’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

This story, which describes the narrator’s journey from Calcutta to London in 1964, and then, five years later to Boston, is funny and entertaining, but also deeply moving. I’ve travelled in India and lived in America and adjusted to the differences between Britain and both countries, and I wondered whether this was partly why I found it so relatable, but I think that really, it’s because it’s a story about a common human experience: being alone in a strange place and gradually finding community and a connection with others.

The bulk of the story, set in Boston in 1969, where the narrator works in a library at MIT, centres on his relationship with his first American landlady, a woman of 103, who lives alone and takes in students as lodgers. The narrator’s interactions with her begin with her insistence that he says, “Splendid!” every time she announces that there’s an American flag on the moon, a request which leaves him “baffled and somewhat insulted”, but becomes a comforting ritual between them. Their relationship opens out into tenderness and a sense of warm attachment, and the point where he finds out how old she is and thinks back to how he took care of his own widowed mother as a teenager is very emotional.

The story of settling in a new country is interspersed with the story of the narrator’s new wife, Mala, who he has left with his brother in London, to wait for the documents which will allow her to join him and who cries every night for India and her parents. It’s an arranged marriage and though the narrator comes across as warm, kind, and well-meaning in every other area of his life, he has little sympathy for Mala, who he barely knows. It’s only when she finally arrives in Boston and he introduces her to his erstwhile landlady, who scrutinises her with what at first seems like hostility, that he starts to see her more empathetically:

“I remembered my first days in London, learning how to take the Tube to Russell Square, riding an escalator for the first time, unable to understand that when the man cried “piper”, it meant “paper”, unable to decipher, for a whole year, that the conductor said “Mind the gap” as the train pulled away from each station. Like me, Mala had travelled far from home, not knowing where she was going, or what she would find, for no other reason than to be my wife.”

First published in the New Yorker and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Interpreter of Maladies, Houghton Mifflin, 1999

‘Open Wounds’ by Edna O’Brien

I’ve always loved Edna O’Brien’s work, but this atmospheric, beautifully written story about an estrangement between two parts of a family and the attempt of the narrator and her cousin, Edward, to mend it years later has stayed with me in an especially insistent way since I first read it. The original dispute centred on the way Edward treated his mother years before; the description of her leaving his house on foot with her belongings and taking refuge in the narrator’s family home after his new wife objected to her, is very moving. “But, with so many dead,” the narrator explains, after she bumps into him on a visit home, ‘there was no need for estrangement anymore.”

The story moves freely through time, but its focal point is a family graveyard, which is on an island and only accessible by boat, and O’Brien’s descriptions of it at different times in the story are memorable:

“There were limestone tombs, blotched with white lichen … Swallows were swooping and scudding in and out of the several sacred churches, once the abode of monks, but long since uninhabited, the roofs gone, but the walls and ornamental doorways still standing, grey and sturdy, with their own mosaics of lichen”.

The narrator visits it “clandestinely” before her reconciliation with Edward and then several times with him and these visits bring them closer together. The descriptions of the cousins’ growing friendship are tender and moving. He begins to know almost telepathically when she will ring and to come in early from the fields to answer the phone; she visits him at home and in hospital, and sits quietly with him as he cries about the past, but the relationship is not straightforward and a new rift eventually opens between them.

I love the lyricism and detail in this story, and the atmospheric sense of an island graveyard heavy with history, just as the cousins’ relationship is weighed down and strained by their own family history, but what I admire most is the complication that’s so astutely depicted in both the cousins’ characters – the ways in which they come closer, then hold each other off and the vulnerability and refusal to compromise that’s in both of them is powerful and vividly realistic.

First published in the New Yorker, 2009, and available for subscribers to read here. Collected in Saints and Sinners, Faber and Faber, 2011

‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan

I devoured this story in an afternoon, drawn in by the beauty of the writing and by the beguiling sense of uncertainty it creates. It begins with a father driving his young daughter to a farm and leaving her there with relatives she doesn’t know, without telling her when he’ll come back for her. She knows that her mother is about to have a new baby and hears her father say that it’s difficult to feed all his children, but the rest is a vacuum.

The first pages are uneasy; the story is narrated by the girl, and we follow her through the unfamiliar house, taking in the details – the “big mahogany clock”, the “hard, clean tiles”, the black and white cat crossing the window ledge – without quite knowing what the people are like, or what will happen to her there. Like her, we start to build a fragile trust in the couple she’s been left with, but there’s something ambiguous about the writing that makes that trust falter at certain moments, for example when the woman insists that the girl gets into a bath that she’s sure is much too hot, but which turns out just to be more luxurious than she’s used to. As readers, our sense of stability is constantly shaken and it takes time to be certain that our initial assessment of the couple is correct and to witness the small kindnesses and acts of instinctive sensitivity that gradually build into the certain knowledge that the couple are exceptionally loving and that the girl will be happier and better cared for there than she’s been before. A sense of foreboding shadows the narrative, even so, undercutting even her happiest, most secure moments and a secret is eventually revealed that changes our understanding of everything that’s gone before.

Faber and Faber, 2010, published in revised form by Faber and Faber, 2022

‘The Dead’ by James Joyce

The effect of reading this story, as we follow its main character, Gabriel Conroy, from a dark winter’s night into the noise and light of his aunts’ party and then later back out into the darkness, where he ends up in a silent hotel room, watching snow fall and struggling with his thoughts, is like seeing Bede’s sparrow fly into the banqueting hall from darkness and out the other side into darkness again. By the end, life, with all its light and conviviality, its difficulties and tension, seems fragile and temporary.

The story begins with activity and music. As Gabriel arrives at the party, his aunts rush backwards and forwards anxiously, worrying about who has come and whether they can manage a guest who’s likely to arrive drunk. There are a large number of guests and Joyce manages the intensity of Gabriel’s various interactions with them effortlessly, interspersing moments of acute embarrassment, anger and boredom with the movement of dancers and the sound of other voices.

The contrast between those scenes and the silence of the hotel room later is stark. And the end of the story, where Gabriel’s mood turns from intense desire for his wife to anger and then sadness as he finds her preoccupied with a song she heard earlier in the evening, which reminded her of Michael Furey, a boy who once loved her, but died very young, and whose death she feels partly responsible for, because he visited her in the rain when he was ill, is beautiful and intensely moving, especially as Gabriel finds himself almost seeing the land of the dead:

“The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.”

First published in Dubliners by James Joyce, Grant Richards Ltd, 1915 and later by Grafton Books, 1977. Read online here

‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka, translated by David Wyllie

I’ve thought about this story a lot over the years and each time I reread it, I see it slightly differently. Its beginning will be familiar to many readers: Gregor Samsa, a mild-mannered and well-meaning young man, who has been supporting his family as a travelling salesman since his father’s business collapsed five years before, wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect. Comically, his first reactions include an extreme anxiety about being late for work and he focuses on the physically difficult task of turning over in his shell and getting off his bed, still hoping to make the next train, so that his boss won’t be inconvenienced.

His family are horrified by his transformation. His father reacts aggressively and his sister, who he’s especially close to, and who even now tries to find food that he will like, reacts with an instinctive revulsion which she tries to hide, but which progresses, as the story continues, into outright rejection.

This is a story about difference and alienation, about wanting to belong and about what it means to be human. It’s also a story about the extreme toll that caring for someone especially vulnerable and dependent over a long period of time can take on a family, but the love Gregor feels for his younger sister, and the extent to which he’s hurt by her ultimate rejection of him are what gives it its real emotional power.

First published in 1915 in Die Weissen Blätter; first published in English in 1937, translated by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir. Read online here

‘The Invisible’ by Jo Lloyd

I’ve only recently discovered Jo Lloyd’s work, but I’m so glad I have. I read her collection, The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies in a few days earlier this year, moving easily from one story to the next, always hungry to read more. It’s unusual for me to read a short story collection sequentially like that, but I was completely drawn in and didn’t want to stop.

Jo Lloyd’s prose is elegant and often beautiful, and her characters feel deeply relatable to me. This story, which won the BBC National Short Story Competition in 2019, is strikingly original. It’s told from the perspective of villagers who hear about, but never see, the Ingrams, a privileged, but invisible family, who are said to live nearby. Only one woman, Martha, claims to have seen them, and she tells the others, in detail, about their personalities and the way they live.

The villagers’ scepticism is balanced against their growing wish to believe the family are real, and soon they’re intrigued, proud to have this special family nearby. Their children admire the Ingrams and pretend to be them. But as winter arrives and the villagers’ own struggles become more pronounced, their response to the Ingrams tips towards jealousy. While the villagers are hungry and cold, surviving on “husks and air”, the Ingrams are said to be “busy at their sports and pastimes” and to “enjoy jugged hare”.

Lloyd builds a remarkable sense of resentment in the villagers, which is all the stronger for being so frustrating. They can’t see the Ingrams. It’s not even clear whether they actually exist, but the sense of injustice the villagers are left with is very real.

The story feels myth-like and ethereal in some ways, and is set in a bygone era, but the emotions it arouses are entirely recognisable and relevant to the world we live in. I recommend that you read this story, if you haven’t already. It’s an astonishing achievement.

First published in The BBC National Short Story Competition 2021, and collected in The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies, Swift Press, 2021

‘You’re Ugly, Too’ by Lorrie Moore

I read a lot of Lorrie Moore in my twenties and have kept coming back to her stories since then. Her writing is genuinely funny, both in terms of what the characters say and think, and in terms of their personalities and assumptions, and the way they live their lives. It’s this blend of very readable, relatable prose, and her characters’ private yearning towards meaning and substance that gives the stories their resonance. Moore shows us the surface of life and the turmoil and dissatisfaction that can exist beneath it, too.

In this story, Zoe, who teaches History at a college in Illinois, keeps comparing her life with standards set by others – by her students, who evaluate her and sum her up in increasingly outraged complaints (“Sometimes Professor Hendricks will take up the class’s time just talking about movies she’s seen”), and by her younger sister, who lives in a much more luxurious apartment in New York and is marrying an independently rich man “with an amusing little job in book publishing”. Characters tell jokes, conversations are unexpectedly witty, the whole story is light and engrossing, but there’s an ache of quiet desperation underneath it all. Zoe feels she’s going nowhere. What she has and achieves never feels like enough, she has an acute sense of failure without quite being able to pinpoint why, she insistently tells stories about another woman, who lost her sense of self and couldn’t survive, and she’s undergoing medical tests that she tries not to think about, but all the same, she laughs, dresses up for Halloween and pushes her deeper feelings away. For me, this is Moore at her best.

First published in The New Yorker, 1989 and available for subscribers to read here; collected in Like Life, Faber and Faber, 1990 and The Collected Stories, Faber and Faber, 2008

‘Heavy Weather’ by Helen Simpson

I first read this story, about a couple trying to manage their daughter’s jealous rages after the birth of their second baby, before I had children and it seemed like a window into a particularly extreme experience that affected only these particular characters – a world I could sympathise with, but knew I’d never live in.

When I read it again, after having children myself, it felt completely different – it had more resonance and power now; it was suddenly an accurate depiction of a widely shared and highly relatable experience. The description of the couple attempting to visit Hardy’s house while dealing with their daughter’s almost constant interruptions (“Don’t talk!”) and the resentment of the house’s custodian, who assumes their daughter will behave badly and tries to ban the mother from breastfeeding her new baby on the bench outside in case it offends other tourists (“they don’t come all this way to see THAT sort of thing”) is hilarious because it’s so recognisable, but the extent to which the mother is isolated and frantically over-extended, just managing to cope with the demands of the children, but utterly exhausted and drained to the extent of having to suppress her own sense of self becomes more apparent as the story progresses and the description of her as a “Woman Overboard”, almost sunk by the births of the two children, is haunting:

“He’d watched, ineffectual but sympathetic, trying to keep her cheerful as she clung to the edge of the raft, holding out weevil-free biscuits for her to nibble, and all the time she gazed at him with appalled eyes. Just as they had grown used to this state, difficult but tenable, and were even managing to start hauling her on board again an inch at a time … along came the second baby in a great slap of a wave that drove her off the raft altogether. Now she was out there in the sea while he bobbed up and down, forlorn, but more or less dry, and watched her face, between its two satellites dwindling to the size of a fist, then to a plum, and at last to a mere speck of plankton.”

First published in Granta 43: Best of Young British Novelists 2, 1993. Also available in the collection Dear George, Minerva, 1995,and in Simpson’s selected stories, A Bunch of Fives, Vintage, 2012. Available to Granta subscribers here

‘Secrets’ by Bernard MacLaverty

Bernard MacLaverty’s work has always resonated with me and I would rate Cal as one of the best novels I’ve read, but this very short story about trust and loss has also lingered in my mind for years. Its concept is simple: a boy about to take A-Levels is called away from his girlfriend, who he’s been studying with, and walks to the house of his great-aunt, who is expected to die that evening. Other family members are with her and as he waits and prays with them, he thinks back over his relationship with her and especially to a pivotal moment eight years before. MacLaverty is brilliant at evoking both the sense of a place and at building an overwhelming sense of emotion, which gains its power partly by being so rooted in what is ordinary and understandable. The betrayal in this story is small and relatable, rooted as it is in curiosity, but overwhelming in the damage it does to the relationship and to the boy’s sense of himself. His deep sadness as he tries to find out whether his great-aunt has forgiven him pulses through the narrative.

In Secrets and Other Stories, Viking, 1984