I'm not normally a fan of short story collections but I particularly like Kit de Waal as a writer so decided to give this collection a go. The stories are very short - some no more than two pages - and the whole collection took under two hours to read. There's a big variety of characters and settings here = each one starts with the character name, year and place. But the rest is up to the reader to work out, and quickly given the length.

Some - possibly all.- of the characters are from - or related to - de Waal's two novels. I say 'possibly all' because although I enjoyed those books and read them in the last couple of years, I can't remember the exact details of them, or the names of the minor characters. It probably helps though to have read her novels as it means you can identify with some of the characters and know their background without needing the word count. It also fills in some information about 'what happened next' and missing scenes from the novels. However, you don't need to have read the novels to appreciate these stories.

There's no doubt that de Waal is a good writer - her stories encompass a huge range of people, of different ages, ethnicities, genders and life situations. She writes of a young man being released from prison in the 1980s, a middle aged middle class mother returning home after her only son's wedding in the 2010s, a woman in small-town Ireland in the 1960s,, and plenty more besides. Her turn of phrase is good and she has the ability to make interesting observations and express them in an entertaining way.

For me, the stories are just too short and too disjointed to give this more than a three star rating. It's a book you read for the writing rather than the overall effect. The page time with each character is much too short to build up a relationship with the character and come to care about them. And although there is the link with her novels, those were two very different books, and the stories are jumbled together without an order or flow that I could work out. There was no unifying theme or underlying plot arch, as you see in some story collections. For longer short stories that can stand alone, that isn't so much of an issue. But for tiny vignettes you really need to stitch them into something bigger.

Fans of the short story format may enjoy this more than I did, and certainly I can't fault it on a page-by-page basis in terms of the writing quality. It just lacks a sense of a 'grand plan' that would raise it above the sum of its parts.

I only found out that the “supporting cast” protagonists of this short story collection were characters from Kit de Waal’s other novels when I got to the acknowledgements. Having not reading anything else by de Waal, at least she can be assured that these stories stand up on their own, and not just as addendum to her other work. All of the many voices are really well done in the collection, and I liked the folkloreish element to many of them. I’ll be following this up by seeking out more by de Waal I think.

I loved both of Kit de Waal’s novels I’ve read in the last few years and was delighted to find she is revisiting here some of the characters from these and giving us a taste of what the future holds for them. I was very moved by the back stories she gives us, too, and I’m thinking here particularly of the MacNaughton family who feature in several. She has such a talent for the short story form (and some are really very short indeed), conjuring up emotion and atmosphere quickly and forcefully. Highly recommended, though perhaps not before reading ‘My Name is Leon’ or ‘The Trick to Time’, both of which are terrific.

A beautiful collection of stories looking at love, loss, joy and grief. The eclectic cast of characters are bought to life in such vivid colours and even if their stories are brief at times, the depth of my feelings for them was as full as if I had known them all. An author who can provoke such vast and raw emotion from characters who we only meet briefly has a rare talent indeed.

This is an eclectic mix of short stories from the very talented Kit de Waal. Some are extremely short but they are thoughtful, incisive and encompass a whole range of human emotions. There’s a poignancy in quite a few stories which is very touching, for example, one story shows how a partner leaving can render you so low that you lose yourself entirely. There’s Sylvia on the bus to Leighton Buzzard to meet a solicitor to arrange a divorce whose random thoughts of a love gone sour made me smile but also sense how much she has lost. There’s a released prisoner whose only thought is a longing for his son, one story shows a brutal side of human nature, there’s a search for identity, disappointments in love, loneliness and so on. Quite a few look at the various ways that people grieve and respond to loss, one character questions the existence of God as she has lost so much, there’s sacrifice for the love of another but what unites them all is how beautifully they are written. They touch your heart and move you, some made me pause and reflect and I’m still thinking about one or two now. I really like that the group of stories ended with Big Tom Fallon’s wedding speech where he speaks of what he has lost but how much he has gained through the friendship of Paulie and the love of Marie, that is a beautiful way to end this wonderful experience.

With thanks to NetGalley, Penguin UK and Kit de Waal.