Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

Michelle Mclean has a grip on contemporary life. Her stories are cloths of finely-woven detail, all of which we recognise as part of modernity and life in the West Midlands. Her characters are part of this present moment, caught up in their own struggles, for wealth perhaps, or for anonymity, or even bare survival. They plough their lonely furrow, yet do not know what awaits them, even in their lives’ apparent plausibility and security. What is more, they know little about others, the lives surrounding their own lives. A day of reckoning must come, and when it inevitably does, it is with a shock, not only to themselves, but also to the reader. We are aware suddenly of what normal life and social interaction may conceal. These are dark, vivid tales, to be taken at a teabreak singly, because twenty minutes is needed to absorb their impact. But in that teabreak these acute portrayals will absorb you, and then uncannily return to you long after your tea has been drunk.