Over the past decade Lauren Groff has written three novels; she now returns to the short story form in this, her second collection. Last year she was named as one of the best young American novelists by Granta, a reputation that’s been growing since the 2015 publication of her critically acclaimed Fates and Furies, a sprawling portrait of a marriage nominated by Barack Obama as his book of the year.
Groff, originally from New York, lives in Florida, and these 11 stories take that state as their focus — a place where panthers prowl perimeters, 15ft-alligators glide through the swamps and air-conditioners ‘crouch like trolls under the windows’. Almost all her protagonists are women, who try to navigate a treacherous exterior landscape alongside their own dissatisfactions, hopes and anxieties.
Heavy weather dominates. In ‘Eyewall’, the narrator welcomes the ‘hurricane’s bruise’ thundering towards her house, and stands serenely, ‘a captain at the wheel’.
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