Openings: Thirteen Stories

These stories bear careful witness to the everyday hopes, insecurities and preoccupations of real people. Each story is a masterclass in attentiveness. Caldwell understands what it means to be both a flawed and functioning human being. Again and again she captures this tension with devastating precision and perfectly-formed sentences. Her work is characterised by deep empathy. You'll lose yourself in this collection and, most likely, find yourself too.

Crystalline and complex. An intuitive understanding of people and situation, a warm intelligence, grace. That's what I expect from one of the finest short story writers at work today and I am never disappointed. These thirteen stories - of possibility and limitation, joy and sadness - are honest, finely nuanced and indelible in their impact.

How have I not encountered these riveting worlds on the page before? It takes a writer as subtle, compassionate and clear-eyed as Caldwell to track the hidden forces that work upon us, to illuminate our secret selves. This is prose that liberates.

Nobody gets more into a short story than Lucy Caldwell [...] Nobody writes about parenthood better . . . Caldwell is superb at evoking the density of experience that we all cram into our ordinary days and nights. In these stories, emotional truth hinges on the smallest movements of a sentence, a paragraph. It’s all in the turn of a word; and, in Caldwell’s extraordinary pages, there’s never a word out of place.

Enlightening and enriching . . . Throughout there is Caldwell’s trademark thoughtfulness and compassion, which manifests on the page as a longing for her characters to live well . . . Her oeuvre is very much in the vein of writers such as Tessa Hadley and Anne Enright, where extraordinary attention to detail makes the ordinary feel special or new.

Witty, shrewd . . . There are moments of darkness in Openings, but the direction of travel is towards release and acceptance.