Summerwater

I picked this up thinking it was by a different author but carried on reading it regardless. It’s pretty much a collection of related short stories set on the same day. I’m not generally enamoured by short stories but this kind of thing is the exception. Because of the relationship between the stories each of them fills in details about the others and I like the way that that works.

The stories are all set on a rainy summer day in a run down holiday village in Scotland. The stories are told by the people staying at the lodges on the loch shore. We see the point of view of someone and then later we see things from their spouse/sibling/child/parent’s point of view and it that changes what you think about the first person’s story. And also you see everyone as they appear to the people they don’t know. These little glimpses of other people’s lives add to the big picture. I really liked all of the little details of this.

But there was a big ending to the book, and this didn’t seem to come out of the small details I’d enjoyed, and didn’t seem necessary. It left me feeling like I’d missed something, and maybe I had. Maybe the point was that some of the people didn’t get to tell their stories but I wanted to know how things felt from the outsider’s points of view as well.