We are not the Same Anymore

A man turns up at his daughter's birthday party with a goldfish in an ice-cream container. On the way to collect firewood, a woman and her teenaged neighbour crash in a snowstorm. An unwilling son helps his sister and father put up posters for a missing dog named Michael. Familiar and endearing, Somerville's characters in Chris Somerville's stories are consumed with their own neuroses, and through their eyes, the landscape of the domestic becomes surreal and dully terrifying. Suffused with a dark humour, their struggles for connection are recreated on the page with a genuine and affectionate touch. Somerville plays out the small catastrophes of everyday life, cutting his characters adrift in the uneasiness that ensures. 'Chris Somerville has a unique voice, intelligent, quiet and yet very funny. These stories of emotional disconnection, familial ties and the melancholy bonds of marriage have, above all, a fundamental sense of truth.' Krissy Kneen