It's a while now since I was delighted to receive from Nicholas Royle the latest production of his Nightjar short story imprint, and at long last I have the time to write about it here. Two beautifully produced chapbooks, as ever, smartly typeset and printed on lovely silky paper, in limited signed editions, this latest pair sporting jackets in differing tones of lush purple. Nightjar is of course dedicated to the weird or strange, and neither of these stories disappoints on that score, although they each, in their individual ways, differ in tone from most of the books in the series which tend toward the spooky. John Rutter's 'Last Christmas' has indeed something of a Punch-and-Judy feel: set at an eye-opening family Christmas dinner, it's a metaphoric treatment of ageism and the notion that the younger we are the bigger the space and attention we take up, and the older the less. Leone Ross's 'The Woman Who Lived in a Restaurant' is a kind of fairytale that is also a love story, and has a lushly haunting quality.
If you collect these editions - and I know many people do - then better rush and
order these two before they sell out, as several in the series already have.
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