He Used to Do Dangerous Things

A grieving woman tells her counselor increasingly elaborate and contradictory accounts of the night her partner died... A solitary pensioner, cut off from the world in the depths of lockdown, resorts to sitting in his apartment block's meter room to watch the electricity gauges surge with life... A traveling vending machine operator takes his goldfish with him on his long-haul journeys to alleviate its separation anxiety... The characters in Gaia Holmes' debut fiction collection adopt complex and ingenious mechanisms for processing a world that is at once too close and too far removed, needing to feel the presence of others, whilst also being overwhelmed by it. Whether it's the trauma of the pandemic and its many isolations, or the chaotic, draining lives of loved ones or neighbors, these stories explore the ingenuity of people striving to rebuild themselves, fortify their defenses and, most courageously, connect. Bringing with her the open-hearted lyricism, intense textures and inherent strangeness that set her poetry apart, Holmes arrives at the short story as the finished article: a master chronicler of 21st century Britain.