Rooted in 70s and 80s Britain, this evocative flash fiction collection captures the moments when girls and women first glimpsed their own power – or lack of it.
Set against a backdrop of smoky kitchens, playground politics, and flickering TV sets, these stories trace the quiet rebellions and uneasy compromises of lives shaped by expectation and constraint. Two women swap secrets at the school gates about an unfaithful husband. A father trades his daughter’s first kiss for a fishing trip. A girl becomes convinced the silent calls to her home are from the Yorkshire Ripper.
By turns tender, raw, and defiant, this collection lays bare the tension between freedom and conformity, love and survival, and what it meant to come of age in a world that wasn’t always ready for you.
Kathryn Aldridge-Morris’ short form fiction and essays have been published widely in print and online literary journals, including the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, The Four Faced Liar, Stanchion Magazine, New Flash Fiction Review, Leon Literary Review and Paris Lit Up, as well as being anthologised in over twenty print anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio Sounds. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Forge Literary Magazine’s Flash Nonfiction competition, the Manchester Writing School QuietManDave Prize, and Welsh publisher Lucent Dreaming’s Flash Fiction contest, and her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of an Arts Council England Award to write a novella.
Read: ‘Midnight Sun’ by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, bracken
First line: He screams that he’s fine and no he won’t open the fucking door and just get a damn towel, enough with the questions.