Estelle Tang

The title of Sarah Hopkins’s second novel, Speak to Me, is an exhortation: bridge the gap between us. It is also an expression of hope, however misguided, that such a gap can be bridged: if only we could speak, we could heal. ... (read more)

Cass Lehman keeps to herself – her mother and grandmother tell other residents of sleepy Jewel Bay that she is agoraphobic. Her real reason for staying in her house for the past nine years is that she has a terrifying kind of ‘retrocognition’: if Cass passes over a place where someone has died, she experiences their death. And death, as it turns out, is everywhere: on the street, at newly re ... (read more)

Louisa and Harry are both haunted. Louisa’s ghost is Tom, a son who took his own life. Harry’s spectres are no less troubling for still being alive; a failed marriage and unknown daughter pluck at his mind, are ‘imprinted on him’. These baby boomers, portrayed in alternating third-person chapters, are poorly matched against contemporary societal challenges, and possibly each other. Ex-sold ... (read more)

The final offering in Patrick Holland’s first collection of short stories is also its best. In ‘The Source of the Silence’, a motor mechanic casts his mind back fifteen years; he is remembering ‘a sister who was fourteen then and has never grown older’, whose thoughts he could hear before she spoke them. The story is an account of a severed bond so enduring that it haunts the survivor’ ... (read more)