T.S. Eliot once commented that “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality, Reality, Jackie Kay’s latest collection of short-stories, explores the thin
line that separates art and the supposed real world. In these 15 stories, 14 of which are written in an intimate first-person voice, Kay brings the reader on a journey with the lonely and
dispossessed, as they try and comprehend their own perceived reality.
In Mini Me, we follow ─ in a phonetic Scottish dialect ─ Patricia, a middle-aged woman who battles with her weekly dietary schedule; In Hadassah, Kay
retells the biblical story of Esther in a modern setting, through the broken English of a prostitute who is being held against her will; and in These Are Not My Clothes, the reader
enters into the consciousness of Margaret, an elderly lady spending her final days in a nursing home, dreaming of her youth.
Jackie Kay published her first collection of poetry: The Adoption Papers in 1991.
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