The Anechoic Chamber by Will Wiles (Salt £9.99, 144pp)
Welcome to the off-kilter neighbourhoods in Will Wiles’ weird world, where warnings are ignored and sage advice goes unheeded, with dire consequences for his increasingly frightened characters in these nimble, shivery stories.
The titular tale sets the goosebumpy tone as a troubled man hears a hectoring voice from his past in an entirely silent, soundproofed chamber.
Elsewhere in this uncanny collection there’s an eerie Roman mosaic, with the prophetic ability to depict the face of future killers as described by a soldier awaiting his own demise on the battlefield of Loos, Belgium, 1915 (Tesserae).
And a mystery surrounds a strange star-gazing cult in a block of flats in Barcelona built by a controversial architect (A Private Square Of Sky).
The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel Translated by Rosalind Harvey (Fitzcarraldo Editions £10.99, 128pp)
Excelling at pinpointing the uneasy in the everyday, these stories delve into characters who find themselves adrift in an unstable world.
Here, families don’t provide comfort, but instead provoke existential crisis and the dawning realisation that close relationships can be emotionally suffocating rather than sustaining.
In Playing With Fire a disgruntled family, driven mad by lockdown, head for a weekend break in the countryside but are confronted by unnerving home truths.
There’s a similarly unnerving secretiveness in Imprinting, where the reasons for an uncle’s estrangement are obliquely made clear to a niece, who’s left with a disconcerting sense of her own waywardness.
Hail Mary by Funmi Fetto (Magpie Books £16.99, 208pp)
Powerful, and emotionally intense, Fetto’s hard-hitting debut collection of short stories unspools the lives of nine Nigerian women.
All are ‘runaways, hiding from something or someone’, as they attempt to break free of bad relationships and traditional expectations.
It’s a bleak world for Nkechi, a maid for a rich Lagos family, who bears the brunt of Madame’s rage (House Girl); and for Riliwa, who’s in financial thrall to a well-connected friend who helps her navigate the shadowy world of illegal immigrant life in London – but for a hefty price (Hail Mary).
