Spare Us Yet and Other Stories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781951319946)

In Spare Us Yet and Other Stories, Smith navigates the bewildering currents of modern life from Fiji to Utah to rural Australia. The monologue of a nineteenth-century washerwoman rescued from deadly peril strikes us as immediately and psychologically realistic as that of a twenty-first-century minor bureaucrat driven to madness by his uprooted anonymity. With psychological perceptiveness and uncompromising honesty, Smith carries heavy themes of faith and fear, conversion and doubt, freedom and death with such grace that the changes that come may at first appear, to the undiscerning eye, light. Like a skilled surgeon with a sharp scalpel, he works relentlessly to get to the marrow: no one is given an easy pass, nor dismissed as a lost cause.

Eschewing the strident iconoclasm that has become so commonplace in almost every quarter, Smith gives us a catalogue of human folly. Refraining from the hagiography of the "outsider as hero," refusing to slash the "ordinary" and "normal," he demonstrates a generous affection for the people in his pages. In stories bereft of both sentimentality and misguided mercy, Smith shows how-over the course of years or in less than half a heartbeat-even the most wretched can turn from idols toward icons.

The stories in Spare Us Yet combine honest spiritual reflection with penetrating psychological insight. Smith's elegant and unaffected prose style belies the depth of his thought. He writes with great warmth, but never lapses into sentimentality.

-John Morrissey, a 2024 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist and author of Firelight (2023), award Winner, Queensland Literary Awards Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection, 2024

You might know some of these men, your own brothers, uncles, friends. And then there are voices so unique and intriguing, you wonder who they are. These complicated characters call out, clash and confront God. Smith never leaves us with a tidy answer or ending and injustice befalls even the good among us. Yet there is a quiet Presence within each of these stories; we are not abandoned. For now we see through a glass darkly but one day we will know.

-Shemaiah Gonzalez, author of Undaunted Joy: The Revolutionary Act of Cultivating Delight