Hope born of fantasy

Molly Guinness reviews Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories

Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories tends to focus on the lonely, the mousy and the underachieving, and she combines serious and comic elements with varying degrees of success. The combination works well in ‘Birth Rage’, where a woman loses her temper with a self-obsessed harridan in an anger management class and suddenly finds her lifelong rage melting in the same woman’s arms. In ‘Germans’, there is sustained psychological accuracy; Alice has come to heal a 40-year rift with her aunt Patricia which developed when Alice married a German. When she gets to Patricia’s house, it is full of German lodgers; as Alice wonders who is the main carer for her bed-ridden relation, this flashes through her mind in one of Perriam’s best moments of comic insight: ‘A German performing such intimate tasks? The mere thought was blasphemous.’