by Susan Wicks

Roll up for the Arabian Derby, a sinister fairground booth where children are tempted, become addicted and can never escape. Roll up for an unpredictable and threatening ride where death is a body in the road, a binbag of shoes, or a pair of unlikely female voyeurs – where babies grow as big as adults and a meeting with a ventriloquist’s dummy can change your life. These are uncomfortable, poignant, sometimes funny stories in which intimate relationships splinter and crack. In this, her first collection of short fiction, Susan Wicks’s strange juxtapositions invite us to explore our frustrations and evasions, the lies we tell one another and ourselves.

‘You never know where a story by Susan Wicks will lead you – into an encounter with a poignant strangeness almost indistinguishable from the everyday or – even more surprising – a quiet shock of tenderness. Nothing is routine in these small worlds, as tough as they are subtle, each with a novel's-worth of implication spreading out from finely understated endings where the author steps back to leave the reader in possession of the story, or possessed by it.’  (Philip Gross)

Susan Wicks’s fine stories are gems cut with uncanny precision.  The quiet clarity of her writing can convey the exact contours of a scene or the tones of a voice; and her fidelity to the sense impressions of the surface opens up hinterlands of surreal or symbolic implication, by turns tender, comic and disturbing. (Martin Scofield, author of The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story)

‘Susan Wicks’s prose works find haunting new shapes for the practical and emotional dilemmas specific to modern women’s lives.’ (Stephen Burt, TLS)

SUSAN WICKS is the author of two novels, one of which, The Key (Faber, 1997), was serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. She has also published a short memoir, Driving My Father (Faber, 1995 and Basic Books, 1996), as well as five collections of poetry, the most recent of which is De-iced (Bloodaxe, 2007). She has read her work on national radio and television and in the National Theatre, as well as in many other contexts. She is currently Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Kent, where short fiction occupies a special place. Roll Up for the Arabian Derby is her first book of short stories.