Short stories: Life-changing moments

On a recent Guardian podcast, Chris Power — who has written a short story column in the Guardian for a decade — recognises the tendency of reviews of the form to begin with ‘an obligatory paragraph on “The Short Story” in capital letters, rather than talking about the work’. Power’s debut collection is itself a love letter to the form, a survey of it and the culmination of a life’s studious interest. So talking about the work itself doubles as a precis of ‘The Short Story’ and its moment.

Happening around the world — often engaged with travelling itself — the ten stories in Mothers take the form’s austerity and turn it into something from which restless characters seek to escape. Eva, a troubled Swedish woman who appears in three stories, exerts a pressure on all the others. They are often skillfully claustrophobic and tense. In ‘The Crossing’, a darkly comic, crafty tale, a woman has an unsatisfactory weekend of sex and hiking with a potential new partner.