Lying Together

Sparkling with sympathy, style and wit, Gaynor Arnold's debut collection is populated by characters searching for equilibrium - whether it is the recalcitrant recovering alcoholics of the title story; the wartime waitress obsessed by a bookish stranger and his secretive past; or the teenage girl terrorized by the mother she nicknames 'The Mouth'. Stretching faultlessly from Paris to inner-city Birmingham, from the present day to the 1940s, these stories explore the daily misunderstandings and self-deceits, the secrets and lies that seep into all our lives. Gaynor Arnold brings the same empathy and social worker's insight to Lying Together that she previously shone on the marriage of Charles Dickens in Girl in a Blue Dress. For reading pleasure and social observation her stories merit comparison with Carol Shields and Shena Mackay.