Description

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR: FICTION

‘A trailblazer in the world of short-form prose’ New Yorker

Lydia Davis is a virtuoso at detecting the seemingly casual, inconsequential surprises of daily life and pinning them for inspection. In Our Strangers, conversations are overheard and misheard, a special delivery letter is mistaken for a rare white butterfly, toddlers learning to speak identify a ping-pong ball as an egg and mumbled remarks betray a marriage. In the glow of Davis’s keen noticing, strangers can become like family and family like strangers.

Our Strangers is a fascinating collection that confirms the genius of a writer whose every attention is transformative.

Publisher Review

Our Strangers shows Lydia Davis’s ‘gift for voice’ and ‘intimate . . . writing’ — CHRIS POWER * * Guardian * * Davis’s ability to observe and celebrate minutiae is as wise and miraculous as ever * * Financial Times * * The wonder of Davis’s work is her ability to reveal how close attention – that rarest of commodities in an attention-starved world – reveals the beauty, sorrow and strangeness of all our seemingly quotidian lives — ERICA WAGNER * * Sunday Times * * Graceful, funny, awkward, surprising, unlikely, persuasive and moving — HEATHER CASS WHITE * * Times Literary Supplement * * Lydia Davis has, in recent years, become the most successful and prominent practitioner of flash and super-short fiction * * Daily Telegraph * * [A] delicious collection of off-beat, drolly observant tales. Even the slenderest (and some are a few scant lines) contain whole worlds of suggestion and feeling, displaying an absorbing inquisitiveness into the natural world and human nature that’s irresistible * * Daily Mail * * Despite the quality of remoteness that permeates all of Davis’s work, in Our Strangers, our present anxieties creep in * * New York Times Book Review * * Davis, a meticulous fiction writer and an acclaimed translator, observes words with care and bemusement, tuned to the way different contexts alter their sound and meaning, sparking confusion or humour or heartbreak * * Los Angeles Times * * Davis is the pre-eminent practitioner of flash fiction . . . Her sharp observations of even mundane human interactions are presented so vividly and economically that they feel like contemporary fables * * New Statesman * * Elegant, mundane and as genius as ever, Lydia Davis has written another timeless and totally perfect collection — CATHERINE LACEY