‘People talk about their childhood and it’s so mundane. I don’t remember much about it, if I’m honest. I can’t even tell you what my father’s voice sounded like.’ In Stuart Evers’s story ‘Frequencies’, in this collection, a besotted new father hears this pronouncement coming from the baby monitor. The monitor is picking up a radio signal, so the sound of eight-month-old Jack’s precious snuffling is overlaid with hardheaded recollections of an anonymous speaker’s parents. ‘They were such dull people… I… pitied them even before I knew what the word meant.’ Eventually the juxtaposition grows too much for the father, and he smashes the baby monitor. Then he goes to see his son.
Jack looked at his father, eyes straight ahead. ‘Dull,’ the boy said. Clearly, distinctly… Dean picked up his son and put him to his chest. Tears were in his eyes. He held his beautiful son and wished Rachel was there to share in the moment.
This fault-line — the rift between our biology and our brains — is where the 12 stories of Evers’s second collection, Your Father Sends His Love, take place.
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