A beautiful young woman walks into Hoad’s gallery to admire a jade vase, and Hoad's life changes forever; Ray watches an insurmountable horror take place and wreaks simple and profound revenge; after her paraplegic father dies, a middle-aged woman finds herself in a solicitor’s office, cataloguing her memories...
In the pages of Hoad and other stories, quiet and complex yearnings for change and transformation are revealed in sometimes mysterious, sometimes fantastical, but always surprising ways. Sarah Passingham’s debut collection is beautifully written, and she makes even the everyday actions of three people’s lives seem elegant.
‘With a subtle prose that is at once forensically precise and deceptively simple, Sarah Passingham is able to show how the wonderful or the macabre can dwell in scenes of quotidian ordinariness. And, like all great short-story writers, she is able to imply entire lives or the plots of whole novels in a matter of a few pages. Superb.’ – Mark Cocker