STORGY

Thrilled to see my story, Uncanny, published on the Storgy website today. Here's a taster - click on the link if you want to read more!

Uncanny by Amanda Huggins

By Storgy in Fiction on October 28, 2019

The new waitress says he reminds her of someone. She presses a finger to her lips, frowning slightly as she looks him up and down, then shakes her head.

‘I can’t think who it is. The image is blurred, a little fuzzy around the edges. If I could sharpen you up, pull you into focus, I might be able to figure it out.’

She smiles at him, tilts her head to one side, all pout and flirt, then reaches up to adjust her hair, holding the clip between straight white teeth. He wants to lean across the counter and trace his finger down the curve of her slender neck. He can sense the pull of her, the dangerous current that would drag him under, yet he wants it all: to taste the salt of her skin, to feel the crackling static of something he’s always been too timid to take.

Book Review - Love by Hanne Orstavik

Love by Hanne Orstavik

Love is set in a small village in north Norway. It follows the story of a mother and son, Vibeke and Jon, who have only lived there a few months. It is the evening before Jon’s ninth birthday and a travelling carnival has arrived in the village. Jon goes out to sell lottery tickets for his sports club and Vibeke sets off to the library. We follow them on their separate journeys through a cold winter's night; journeys filled with the weight of unrelenting menace and foreboding.

A palpable chill runs through the icy heart of this deceptively simple story, conveyed so precisely in Orstavik's sparse yet poetic language. Love explores the distances between people, while seamlessly weaving the two viewpoints tightly together, so that we are taken from Jon’s world to Vibeke’s and back again within just a few short paragraphs.

This slender novella is compelling, powerful and dark, packed with tension and yearning; a haunting tale about loneliness and the search for love. I was captivated until the very end. 

This is a book I won't be lending to anybody in case I don't get it back. It's already on the to-be-read-again pile :-)

(Reviewed after receiving an ARC from And Other Stories in exchange for an honest review.)