Walls of Words: Short Stories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781912513512)

A collection of fifty-four short stories by a prize-winning novelist inspired by family connections and travels across the world. Some are set firmly in the real world: an elderly English spinster living with a grumpy sister reveals a long-kept secret when her American son gets in touch; a shy wife discovers she's more attractive than she had ever imagined when her husband's old friend turns up; a sexist professor learns the cruel truth on overhearing his latest 'conquest' talking to her friend in a cafe. Magic invades realism in 'The Red Chevy', when an old lady in a Texan care home relives her past until she escapes back into it. The writer's personal experience of an earthquake in China inspired 'The Old Grandmother' in which a grandfather and granddaughter make a pilgrimage up Tai Shan mountain to the Buddhist temple on the summit. In other stories, a Japanese man is married to a Manga girl whilst an Aborigine boy in Australia dreams of the legendary Red Kangaroo in 'Kangaroo Dreaming', a dream that foretells the end of White Man's world and a return to the old ways. There's gentle humour in 'The Hole', in which a hen-pecked Scottish Borders husband creates an underground retreat in his garden only to meet up with an ancient Celt doing the same to escape the invading Scots. In 'The Wave', a tribute to all who died in the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami, a wealthy Bangkok doctor returns to the beach where he used to meet up with his first love, a poor fisherman's daughter. An elderly woman questions why the walls in her nursing home whisper about death, and, in 'The Soul Sweeper', we learn what happens to the soul after death. A boy finds the ghost of Victorian girl under his bed in 'Pink Slippers', and in 'The Christmas Dance', a dying musician has his first-ever dance with the Angel of Death. In 'Frog Therapy Ltd', an infirm elderly couple learn that a potential cure also carries a risk of side-effects. In 'One Click Away', a man learns that computer problems extend to beyond the grave, and in 'Cissy', reincarnation links India with England. A notorious Italian jewel thief, who has inherited his mother's ability to transform into anything he chooses, gets comeuppance in one story. In another, a little girl meets a giant rabbit in an allegory about Man's greed destroying his planet. Orphaned tiger cubs kill a village girl to survive in 'The Two-legged Deer', and in 'A Baker's Novel', a dying man tries to re-write a tragic past in a novel. A man fighting for his life on an operating table, after a major head trauma, journeys, inside his head, to death in 'The Letter'. In 'C Sharp Minor', a young girl, aspiring to be a concert pianist, is in emotional turmoil after taking on the part of the teenage countess in a TV biopic about the doomed love affair between Beethoven and the girl for whom he wrote the Moonlight Sonata. One little boy wonders whether a sly fox that killed Old Annie's hens was really the devil; another, in 'The Tower of Truth', avoids a fairgound tower where his grandfather discovers pain, not pleasure, when promised 'the past, present and future.' A doctor discovers disturbing secrets about his family's past from his dementing aunt in one story. In another, an old Spaniard remembers the night his mother and village were wiped out by Franco's men. In 'Hawai'i', did the Polynesian Goddess of fire, Pele, really sit next to a tourist on an airplane? In another story, a classics professor is certain the flight attendant is Aphrodite. Although the stories span different genres, they share a common humanity from across the globe.