Review: A Snow Garden and Other Stories

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in. Greek proverb

I can prescribe A Snow Garden as the perfect antidote to the general feeling of despair that pervades our world at present.

Here are six stories (and a Forward not to be skipped) that gently draw the reader into lives that are messy and complicated and funny and sad. The characters we meet discover sometimes extraordinary and sometimes ordinary facts that have previously eluded them. In The Marriage Manual Will suddenly realises ‘his parents had put him together with the chaos of their loving. They had done their best and they had made mistakes, yes, and most of the time it was no more than a botch-job, and now those mistakes were a part of who he was. But he had been loved, he was loved, and he too could love.’ In The Boxing Day Ball Maureen thought ‘People would find one another, and sometimes it would last moments and sometimes it would last years. You could spend your life with a person and not understand them and then you could meet a boy across a dance floor and feel you knew him like a part of yourself.’

I loved these stories that are written with such heart; they celebrate the essential goodness of humanity.

• Review
• Rachel Joyce