Commonwealth Short Story Prize
Wallflowers
A brother and sister train side by side for a race, then a loss sends them onto different paths. Set against northern landscapes and bodily exertion, the story quietly brings forward the distance that can open inside intimacy.
Work Information
Running does not draw them closer; it reveals the shape of their separation.
We Walked on Water is the Canada and Europe regional winner of the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and is published online by Granta. The story is also collected in Bloomsbury’s Wallflowers, which identifies it as one of the book’s included stories.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Published
- 2016-02-11
- Pages
- 304 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.6 x 2.8 x 19.6 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781408856826
- ISBN-10
- 1408856824
- Price
- 4610 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Literary
________________ 'Assured and ambitious' - Guardian 'A young writer who succeeds in imagining the world afresh' - Independent 'Confirms her as a significant new talent … sharp, illuminating' - Independent on Sunday ________________ From the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize comes a delicate and startling collection about the adventure within the ordinary and the magic within everyday life A small boy and his grandmother set sail for China in the mud of her back yard; a supermarket car park becomes a graveyard of strewn blueberries; migratory birds fly over a marshland ringing with the sound of wooden spoons on kitchen pots; and the breaking of a silence between two roommates leads to disquieting revelations. Eliza Robertson’s delicate and startling stories tell of the adventure of the ordinary and the magic within the everyday. Here there are swindlers and innocents, unlikely heroes and gritty survivors; they teach us how to trap hummingbirds, relinquish dreams gracefully and feed raccoons without getting bitten. From windswept Pacific beaches to cafés in the heart of Lisbon, and from the depths of puddles on mountain running paths to the heights of extrasolar plant 51 Osiris C, these are tales of wildness and wonder, of animals in search of an escape and outsiders looking for a way back in.
Eliza Robertson attended the University of Victoria and the University of East Anglia, where she received the 2011 Man Booker Scholarship. In 2013, she won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize and the Journey Prize. Her first story collection, Wallflowers , was shortlisted for the East Anglia Book Award and selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2015, she was named one of five emerging writers for the Writers’ Trust Five x Five program. She lives in Montreal. elizarobertson.com @ElizaRoberts0n
Reviews
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Wallflowers
I'm pretty sure that Eliza Robertson is destined to be one of the stars of Canadian literature. The best stories in this collection certainly suggest that: 'Who Will Water the Wallflowers?", "My Sister Sang", "Roadnotes" and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize-winning "We Walk on Water" are each superb. The rest however I found to be a bit of a mixed bag. Robertson's writing is imbued with a poetry that makes it hypnotic and begs to be read aloud for the pleasure of it, but sometimes it goes too far - a story about a stolen tiger and two camels was so overdone that I found myself reading it in a ta-tum-te-tum rhythm and not paying attention to the actual story. Other stories seem to just peter out or seem like exercises (the one that is written in reverse order for instance - it's a gimmick I've seen used several times before and often employed to better effect). But, goodness, when she brings everything together in just the right balance she absolutely soars. Definitely a writer to watch.