Jean Sprackland

Fiction

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Ellipsis is a new set of books celebrating the 'short story sequence' - that interlocking daisy-chain of narrative produced when stories knit together to form a continuum of character or theme.

An out-of-season seaside town, a library stocked with memories, a man slowly going mad...

Starting in the hotels and suburbs of a down-at-heel coastal town, Jean Sprackland's stories follow a cast of rootless characters, young men and women clinging to tokens of the past, whose lives are so lacking in ballast they become as unstable as the dunes themselves.

Tim Cooke invites us into a very different space: the derelict rooms and vandalised stairwells of an inner city tower-block. From there, each story draws a claustrophobic spiral round the next, following various characters (or is it the same person?) desperate to flee their demons.

Sean O'Brien's stories also spiral outwards - not from a state of mind but a setting: an ornate, vaulted lending library, an edifice from another age, where unlikely users and chance items found in stock lead to quite different lamentations for the past.

“Sprackland's stories combine narrative energy with affecting compassion for her troubled characters. The Southport-based author moves from forbidden romance in a Swedish furniture store by the M62 to unrequited love on the roller coasters at Blackpool. The sand dunes of the North West conceal dead bodies - and more besides. The author is a poet with two collections to her name, but she has now arrived as a short story writer.”
Nicholas Royle, Time Out