SHORT STORIES

SO LATE IN THE DAY 

by Claire Keegan (Faber £8.99, 64 pp)

It's difficult to pinpoint just how this best-selling author conjures up a welter of emotions in a scant few pages. Keegan's sentences are simple and largely unadorned, and yet this exquisite short story is brimful of feelings and thoughts that seethe and unsettle.

We're in the company of Dublin civil servant Cathal, who is the living embodiment of that wonderfully evocative Wildean phrase, 'he's a man who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing'.

As the story unfurls, Cathal reckons up the cost of his unravelled relationship with his fiancée Sabine (described by his brother as 'that French hoor') and reveals himself to be a man who's mean of spirit and mean with money. It's wonderfully done — a compelling portrait of a man perpetuating an ungenerous family history in all its heartlessness.

WEDNESDAY'S CHILD 

by Yiyun Li (4th Estate £16.99, 256 pp)

Strands of melancholy are braided through Li's tender, thoughtful stories — there are broken marriages, sundered mother-daughter relationships and odd encounters, but it is death whose presence is most keenly felt.

In the titular story, a bereaved woman remembers the bitter recriminations of her own mother, who could never resist the urge to inflict pain 'to cause wreckage when anything wreckable was within reach'.

In Alone, the only survivor of a boating tragedy has spent her adult life 'feeling for ever on the verge of drowning', while in When We Were Happy We Had Other Names, Jiayu, bewildered and burdened by the suicide of her adolescent son, keeps a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost, adding in a tally of recollection and remembrances, 'one moment, one more detail', as she struggles to comprehend the unfathomable mystery of her beloved son's death.

EVERY DROP IS A MAN'S NIGHTMARE 

by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto (Granta £12.99, 272 pp)

Wild and wily, and thrumming with originality, these pack-a-punch short stories are ghost haunted, simmering with superstition and brutally beguiling as they travel to a Hawaii that's mysteriously mythological and caustically contemporary.

Elvis impersonators and Night-Marchers stomp through the dreams of Kakimoto's snarky, disorderly characters.

In the titular tale, a wild boar, a burgeoning teenage body and a pregnancy take a turn for the bloody, while in the standout story, Touch Me Like One Of Your Island Girls: A Love Story, broke Mehana is tempted to make a porno in a coconut bra, 'painstakingly naked in her culture's most devastating cliches'.