Thursday 7 June 2018
Separated from the Sea and Other Stories by Amanda Huggins
Release Date: 2nd June 2018
Publisher: Retreat West Books
Publisher: Retreat West Books
Genres: Short Stories / Women's Fiction
Is
Everything Just Made Up?
Separated From the Sea is the debut short
story collection from award-winning author, Amanda Huggins.
Crossing oceans from Japan to New York and from England to Havana, these stories are filled with a sense of yearning, of loss, of not quite belonging, of not being sure that things are what you thought they were. They are stories imbued with pathos and irony, humour and hope.
Evie meets a past love but he's not the person she thinks he is; a visit to the most romantic city in the world reveals the truth about an affair; Satseko discovers an attentive neighbour is much more than that; Eleanor’s journey on the London Underground doesn't take her where she thought it would.
Crossing oceans from Japan to New York and from England to Havana, these stories are filled with a sense of yearning, of loss, of not quite belonging, of not being sure that things are what you thought they were. They are stories imbued with pathos and irony, humour and hope.
Evie meets a past love but he's not the person she thinks he is; a visit to the most romantic city in the world reveals the truth about an affair; Satseko discovers an attentive neighbour is much more than that; Eleanor’s journey on the London Underground doesn't take her where she thought it would.
GUEST POST
One of
the abiding assumptions that people make about contemporary fiction writers is
that the stories are autobiographical, and all their characters are based on
real people. Naturally, we strenuously deny this – I often hear myself saying,
‘No, I made it up,’ or, ‘But it’s not about me.’ This is usually when my
friends question the validity of my stories that are written in first person.
They seem to forget they’re reading fiction and either accuse me of writing
lies, or ask me why they don’t already know about this episode in my life that
they believe to be fact. This is particularly true if I write a story from the
perspective of a teenage girl in the 1970s. Well that just has to be me,
right?!
So I’ve
become fascinated by the question of just how much of ourselves is actually
revealed in our fiction. Are we in denial? Do we put ourselves in there
consciously or subconsciously? Or is everything just made up?
Of
course there will always be novels that are openly autobiographical, such as
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and J G Ballard’s Empire
of the Sun. However, more often than not we write about fictitious situations
and events, so it’s an automatic reaction to say ‘I made it up’. Yet is that
only part of the truth? We invent complex protagonists as well as stories and
plots, and I believe it is through our characters that we reveal more about
ourselves than we’d care to admit. We can invent the people that we would like
to be – idealised versions of ourselves if you like – or characters who we
would never dare to be, or simply people that we would like to know.
I would
never write an entire short story about something that actually happened to me,
but inevitably I draw on small incidents that really occurred and include those
as part of a longer piece of work.
Just
like the protagonist in my story ‘Better to see him Dead’, I did accidentally
switch the washing machine on with my cat inside – don’t worry, she escaped
unharmed! – but I’ve never worked as a dancer in Paris, lost a child, or taken
a detour off the motorway to stargaze on the moors. And just like Evie in my
story, ‘Enough’, I did slip on the ice and smash a flask of soup I was taking
to
a
homeless man, but I’ve never worked as a hostess in a Tokyo bar or saved a baby
from an oncoming train.
Yet I
genuinely experience all the emotions that my characters feel, and they always
become fully-formed people in my mind. When I create a mental picture of them,
they are never people I have brought over from the real world; yet I feel as
though I know them intimately, and sometimes I am them: walking up the mountain
path, waiting to be asked out by the boy with the floppy fringe, swimming out
to sea to find my lost father, grieving for the loss of a child that was never
more than a negative pregnancy test. The yearning, the longing, the grief and
the love; they are all heartfelt, and I hope this emotional honesty makes my
fiction feel real. It must work at least some of the time, because many readers
have told me that my stories have moved them to tears, and made them laugh too
- it’s not all doom and gloom!. And what more could I ask for than that?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mandy Huggins’s work has been published in
anthologies, travel guides, text books, and literary magazines, as well as in
The Guardian, The Telegraph, Reader's Digest, Take a Break’s Fiction Feast,
Traveller, Mslexia, Wanderlust, and Writers' Forum.
Her travel writing has won several awards, including the British Guild of Travel Writers New Travel Writer Award in 2014, and her short stories are regularly placed and shortlisted in competitions, including Bare Fiction, Fish, InkTears, Cinnamon Press and Retreat West.
A selection of her short fiction is showcased in the InkTears anthology, Death of a Superhero, and her first collection of flash fiction, Brightly Coloured Horses (Chapeltown Books), is now available on Kindle and in paperback.
Mandy's first full length short story collection, Separated From The Sea, will be published by Retreat West Books in June 2018.
Follow her on Twitter @troutiemcfish
Her travel writing has won several awards, including the British Guild of Travel Writers New Travel Writer Award in 2014, and her short stories are regularly placed and shortlisted in competitions, including Bare Fiction, Fish, InkTears, Cinnamon Press and Retreat West.
A selection of her short fiction is showcased in the InkTears anthology, Death of a Superhero, and her first collection of flash fiction, Brightly Coloured Horses (Chapeltown Books), is now available on Kindle and in paperback.
Mandy's first full length short story collection, Separated From The Sea, will be published by Retreat West Books in June 2018.
Follow her on Twitter @troutiemcfish
Retreat West Books is an independent press
publishing paperback books and ebooks.
Founder, Amanda Saint,
is a novelist and short story writer. She’s also a features journalist writing
about environmental sustainability and climate change. So all Retreat West
Books publications take advantage of digital technology advances and are
print-on-demand, in order to make best use of the world’s finite resources.
Retreat West Books is an arm of Amanda’s creative writing
business, Retreat
West, through which she runs fiction writing retreats, courses and
competitions and provides editorial services.
Initially started to publish the anthologies of winning stories
in the Retreat West competitions, Retreat West Books is now open for
submissions for short story collections, novels and memoirs. Submission info can be found here.
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