A woman suffering an extreme allergic reaction to a yoga mat returns to the UK to give a reading at her estranged best friend’s wedding; a corporate new starter desperately tries to persuade her colleague to accept that his online girlfriend doesn’t exist; a group of student activists stage an artful protest against the demolition of a tower block; a once inseparable friendship group confront the reason they drifted; and a self-taught pianist whose wife is six months pregnant decides she must travel to Warsaw to listen to Chopin’s heart.
In The Good Time, Nell Stevens introduces us to characters teetering on the edge of self-knowledge, unveiling the complexities of their inner worlds with empathy and humour.
Wry, precise and full of wisdom, these stories ask what it means to have a good time, and what happens when the good times end.
Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. She is the author of the novel ‘Briefly, A Delicious Life’, and non-fiction books ‘Bleaker House’ and ‘Mrs Gaskell & Me’ (UK) / ‘The Victorian & the Romantic’ (US/CAN), which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, 2018. Her writing is published in The New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. Nell is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick.
Read: Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily, The Stinging Fly
First lines: When I strip the wallpaper in the new flat, I find, underneath it, strange scratches in the plasterwork, lines and curves like an unknown alphabet, finger marks covering the wall behind my bed. I’m anxious to get rid of the wallpaper, though there are countless more urgent things; faced with the splintered floorboards and rotting window frames left behind by the previous owner, and a leaking pipe under the kitchen sink that drips into an old lemonade bottle, it seems easier to worry first about the bedroom walls.