Elsewhere

What do we mean by small town? How has this innocuous term one up from village, a couple down from city, come to function as a pejorative? Pressed to describe what the phrase small town conjures up, we'd be hard pushed to say anything positive: closed-minded; petty; provincial; parochial. On a broad European canvas, however, the rich traditions of short story writing challenge these preconceptions. The stories collected here are neither narrow-minded nor petty, nor do the minds of their protagonists contract to fit their environment. In Germany, a house-husband is slowly sent over the edge by his over-achieving neighbours. In the town of Odda in Norway, a middle-aged Morrissey fan has a matter of hours to find a girlfriend so his ailing mother can die in peace. It s the small gestures a white lie, the turning of a blind eye, a small kindness or a secret kept that allow the characters of these communities to survive, to breathe easily within the seemingly tight strictures life there can impose. It s how we do things round here...