IN THE SEPTEMBER NEWSLETTER FROM VALLEY PRESS I'M TALKING ABOUT MY NEW SHORT STORY COLLECTION...
This month we'd like to introduce you to An Unfamiliar Landscape, with author Amanda Huggins to tell you a bit more about it...
An Unfamiliar Landscape by Amanda Huggins
An Unfamiliar Landscape is
my third collection of short stories, and my first publication with
Valley Press. VP did actually reject my first collection around five
years ago – but they were right to do so! I received some very
encouraging feedback from their external readers, but I can see see now
that it still needed a lot of work.
More recently I’ve published two novels with Victorina Press – All Our Squandered Beauty and Crossing the Lines
– both of which went on to win the Saboteur Award for Best Novella in
2021 and 2022 respectively. However, I’m thrilled to have returned to
the world of short story writing for this collection, as it will always
be my first love – in fact both of my novels started life as
two-thousand word stories.
Crafting a tale in so few words requires a different set of skills to
novel writing, and I don’t think the former should ever be seen as
practise for the latter — a piece of short fiction isn’t a miniature
novel any more than a novel is a protracted short story. I think short
fiction is well-suited to the pace and attention span of the modern
world, yet some readers say they don’t read shorts because they can’t
lose themselves in the action the way they can in a novel. It is true
that they demand your fine-tuned focus, that each sentence needs to
weigh in heavy to earn its place, and so short stories need to be read
slowly and savoured. Yet this brings its own rewards. A cracking story
will repay your time and attention by leaving you with something to
think about for days after you’ve read it.
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Amanda Huggins, author of An Unfamiliar Landscape
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I’m
a big fan of all things Japanese, including literature. Japanese
writers are renowned for sparing and effective use of language, a
certain nuance and elusiveness. These are qualities which suit the short
story form and which draw me back again and again and inform my own
writing.
An Unfamiliar Landscape
takes us on a journey from rain-soaked Berlin to neon-bright Tokyo;
from mid-west North America to the back streets of Paris; from a
suburban London kitchen to a Yorkshire fishing village. Yet wherever the
characters live, and wherever they travel to or from, they are all
navigating unfamiliar ground in their search for answers.
In ‘The Names of the Missing’ Kara walks the streets of Berlin,
photographing the homeless and the displaced while looking for her own
missing boys. Sam and Isla’s familiar world is irrevocably altered ‘In
the Time It Takes to Make a Risotto’, and in ‘Waiting to Fall’ Gina is
unsettled by the wild landscape when she stays at remote Ragwood Hall.
In ‘Something in the Night’ an urban forest plays tricks on Anna’s
perception of reality, and in the title story, Sophia moves through
Tokyo almost unseen; simultaneously freed and trapped by her apparent
invisibility.
These are stories of the yearning to belong and the urge to escape;
tales of grief and alienation, loss and betrayal, love and truth, change
and hope; they are stories from places where everything is not always
as it first appears. I hope you enjoy them!
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An Unfamiliar Landscape is available to pre-order now here and will be released 6th October 2022
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR...
Amanda Huggins is the author of the novellas All Our Squandered Beauty and Crossing the Lines,
both of which won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella, in 2021 and 2022
respectively. She has also published four previous collections of short
fiction and poetry. She was a runner-up in the Costa Short Story Award
2018 and her prize-winning story ‘Red’ features in her collection
Scratched Enamel Heart. In 2020 she won the Colm Toibin International
Short Story Award, was included in the BIFFY50 list of Best British and
Irish Flash Fiction 2019–20, and her poetry chapbook, The Collective Nouns for Birds,
won the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. In 2021 she won the H E
Bates Short Story Competition and was Highly Commended in the Fish
Short Story Prize. Her short fiction has also been broadcast on BBC
Radio and her travel writing has won numerous awards, including the
British Guild of Travel Writers New Travel Writer of the Year Award.
Amanda grew up on the North Yorkshire coast, moved to London in the
1990s, and now lives in West Yorkshire.
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