How do the choices we make, willingly or not, define us?

 

A young man working in a menial job finds a way to grow closer to a lost love. A long-married couple’s relationship is tested by the arrival of a rare bird. With the benefit of hindsight, a woman recalls a childhood episode of acute appendicitis. An outing to a plant nursery brings simmering family tensions explosively to the surface. Two walkers on a beach, unused to the suddenness of a tropical nightfall, lose their way. The chance to grow flowers in a Cornish field brings two strangers together, allowing them both a chance to heal.

 

The characters in these stories find themselves at crossroads: for better or for worse, their lives are about to change. In settings which range from Cornwall’s hidden valleys to the grey, gold and green of Paris in spring, from Central Otago’s alpine lakes to the Milky Way’s river of light, come bids for freedom, transformations, and another chance to get things right.

 

 

Emma Timpany is from Dunedin, New Zealand. Her publications are Travelling in the Dark, Cornish Short Stories: A Collection of Contemporary Cornish Writing (co-editor), Over the Dam, and The Lost of Syros. Her novella, Travelling in the Dark, won the Hall and Woodhouse DLF Writing Prize 2009, and her stories have won awards including the Sara Park Memorial Short Story Competition and the Society of Authors’ Tom-Gallon Trust Award. She lives with her family in Cornwall.

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