The September Newsletter from Valley Press

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.

Amanda Huggins, author of An Unfamiliar Landscape

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!

An Unfamiliar Landscape is available to pre-order now here and will be released 6th October 2022

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.