Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology

These outstanding stories from the 2014 Bristol Short Story Prize will provoke, stimulate, move, amuse, unsettle, and entertain. A wonderfully diverse and exhilarating collection of short stories, that enhances Bristol Short Story Prize's reputation as a major contributor to the resurgence of the short story genre.

English Magic moves through fields and parklands, estates and empty beaches. It lands at Heathrow Airport, takes a taxi to the suburbs, finds emptiness and oppression. It strikes out for the countryside on May Day, to where maypoles whirl and haybales blaze, and where blessings sound like threats. It's in a flat, drags itself out of half sleep... and there's something tapping behind the gas fire... In her debut collection of short stories, Uschi Gatward takes us on a tour of an England simultaneously domestic and wild, familiar and strange, real and imagined. Coupling the past and the present, merging the surreal and the mundane, English Magic is a collection full of humour and warmth, subversion and intoxication. It announces the arrival of a shining new talent.