Stories

The renaissance of Australian writer Garner, who recently won the Baillie Gifford Prize for How to End a Story, continues with this marvelous collection of short fiction. In each poignant entry, a different protagonist grapples with their place in the world. Garner sets a tone of casual cruelty at the start of “Little Helen’s Sunday Afternoon,” when the narrator, a young girl named Helen, arrives for a visit at her uncle Jim’s house just as Jim, a doctor, leaves to attend to “some kid [who] cut his finger off.” While her mother and aunt socialize, Helen encounters her secretive older cousin, Noah, in a dark shed with his friends, and he angrily accuses her of spying. The sparely plotted yet sumptuously detailed “The Life of Art” follows a friendship across many decades, while “Civilisation and Its Discontents” explores the aftermath of an all-encompassing affair. Garner pinpoints the texture of her characters’ missed connections (“The silence was not a silence but a quietness of thinking”), as well as their withering view of the world (“The beautiful are greedy. They suck other people’s eyebeams into their blood cells and feast on them, growing lovelier and more opulent, while puritans like me who starve themselves for the sake of power diminish daily”). These stories ignite new ways of seeing the world. (Mar.)