WHAT DO WE OWE THE STRANGER? WHAT DO WE OWE THE DEAD?
A Japanese man paints a second eye on a doll. A widow holds an injured gull to her chest and cries by the sea. A grieving child climbs a stack of pallets to send a lantern into the sky. A chess player forfeits a game he was winning. A man places three red tulips on a grave.
Marc Joan's critically acclaimed short fiction spans Geneva and San Francisco, Cornwall and Cambridge, Wales and India, the very old and the not-so-old – and the distances between the people who live in them.
Written with delicacy and the occasional dark twist, Smorgasbord is about what we carry across borders – grief, memory, guilt, old age – and what we leave behind.
What did I think?
Smorgasbord by Marc Joan is well named as it really is a little bit of everything.
I don't usually read short stories as I find them a little abrupt and unsatisfying but this is not the case with Marc Joan's collection. The writing is so poetic and lyrical that there wasn't a story I didn't enjoy.
There are 27 short stories with their length ranging from 1 to 23 pages, so it's a book you can read cover to cover or dip in and out of. It's like a virtual trip around the world and I enjoyed every second of it.
Smorgasbord is a collection of incredibly varied and surprisingly deep short stories. I enjoyed it more than I expected and I'm happy to recommend it.
I received a gifted ARC for the Novel Tours blog tour and this is my honest and unbiased opinion.
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