A Day in the Life Book

The short story anthology A Day in the Life is for a good cause--money from every copy sold goes to Breast Cancer Care--but it is also a thoroughly useful survey of the present state of play of women's writing in the UK. There are too many individually excellent stories for picking out examples to be other than arbitrary--the stories vary from Stella Duffy celebrating female friendship to Kate Atkinson on the awful consequences of being named Joan and Joanna Trollope on being middle-aged and a librarian. Maggie O'Farrell provides a classic ghost story and Jane Yardley an extraordinary story about 1960s teenagers discussing the Seven-day War in the Palm House at Kew. Candida Clark's "Ronnie's Watch" has a random act of kindness by a stranger completely changing a young woman's life--and intelligently tells it from the point of view of the stranger--and Mavis Cheek shows how one woman's adultery may entirely spice up the life of her best friend without the friend having to do anything untoward. This is an excellent anthology whose sheer variety of tone and genre is one of its major strengths. --Roz KaveneyRead More