"It's strange how life can turn on the smallest of things. An action or event that seems innocent at the time can lead to more than it should. For me, everything changed because of a feud with the boy next door, a rainstorm, and something to do with a fish pie.""Yes, love is present in small details, but not the details you have shown. Love is in a splinter pulled from a wound, a glass of water fetched in the middle of the night..."
Swimming and other stories is the revised and updated first collection from multiple award-winning New Zealand writer Bernard Steeds. These ten tales range from the dirty realism of the New Zealand landscape to magic realist fables, from love stories to ghost stories to fairy tales and myths. Water features throughout, as a life-and-death force, a medium that connects and divides.Reviews"The first short story, 'Swimming', is touching. The second, 'Ice', is intriguing. The third, 'River Story', is heart-wrenching and involving. And so Bernard Steeds' collection of short stories goes on, pulling the reader deeper into the intensely thought out world of perfectly described landscapes, beautiful and tragic relationships, and the presence of the book's central ingredient-water... substantial, emotive, and great." - Gisborne Herald."My favourite short stories are those that take a supposedly ordinary situation and attack it from a new angle, leaving you viewing the situation - and the world - in a different sense. Steeds is a master at this." - Michael Larsen, New Zealand Herald.
About the authorBernard Steeds is a fiction writer, journalist and researcher from Wellington, New Zealand. His stories have twice won the Sunday Star-Times short story competition, have won the At the Bay Katherine Mansfield Short Fiction Prize, and been shortlisted or commended in numerous other prizes including The Moth Short Story Prize. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including The Penguin New Zealand Anthology: Fifty Stories for Fifty Years in Aotearoa, and The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories.
'... fantastical and spooky...'
- Phillippa Jamieson, Otago Daily Times
'... quite sinister and very bleak...'
- Barbara Weil, Bays and Remuera Times
'... macabre... You know that horrors lie in wait, but there's something deliciously awful about turning the pages towards them.'
- Nicola Salmond, Dominion Post.
'... an eerie, white-witch-of-Narnia-esque tale of a woman's loving relationship with her son, and her sacrifice for him after the icy danger they find themselves in...'
'My favourite short stories are those that take a supposedly ordinary situation and attack it from a new angle, leaving you viewing the situation - and the world - in a different sense. Steeds is a master at this.'
- Michael Larsen, New Zealand Herald
'... a brave collection that is characterised by a remarkable range and maturity...'
- Rebecca J Davies, New Zealand Books
'... surprising, delightful, challenging and satisfying'
- Tessa Duder, author and judge of The Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition
'...extraordinarily good... There isn't a dud story here.'
- Nicola Salmond, The Dominion Post
'... subtle, sensitive and dreamlike...'
- Phillipa Jamieson, Otago Daily Times
'... brilliant...'
