MICHAEL ARDITTI is a distinctive voice in British fiction. He is unusually interested in what is daily, familiar, personal, and connective, and often writes on the compromises that faith demands. Through the voices of ten women, this collection explores the joyous burden of relationship, the pain and comfort of loneliness, and the challenge and freedom of 21st-century living.

As with all books of short stories, this is not a book to hurry through: it is a book to savour, letting each brief insight into a world that is both familiar and other settle and resolve itself. These stories are often about women in their sixties and seventies, and it is refreshing to have those lives on the centre of the stage for a change.

All of the stories are interesting, and his people are intriguing. He often seems to be inspired by a glimpsed story at the bottom of a newspaper page. What happens to a wife after her husband’s arrest for downloading images? What happens to the mother after the death of her 16-year-old boy? What was it like to be on a cruise in the Antarctic in the first weeks of Covid?

Arditti writes about anti-Semitism and class, about the cost of family breakdown and that unhappiness that we work so hard to hide. He writes about forgiveness and justice, about redemption and reconciliation, about love fulfilled and love wasted. At its heart, this collection of stories reminds us that the great themes of literature and scripture are lived out in lives daily.

The tone and the mood of the stories are richly varied: at times, his writing verges on dark comedy; at others, it feels mythical and dramatic. I hope that people will enter into Arditti’s world — and I suspect that the lives and faces that linger for each reader will reflect the stories that resonate most deeply with our lives and stories. Part of the beauty of what Arditti does is to invite us to find our full self and our true meaning in the lives that he creates and opens up for us.

The Revd Richard Lamey is Director of Mission and Ministry in the diocese of Norwich.

The Mellow Madam and Other Stories
Michael Arditti
Salt Publishing £10.99
(978-1-78463-297-7)
Church Times Bookshop £9.89