The fond and funny human details of these stories will restore your affection for the significant others you may have tired of over Christmas
The first time I finished Tenth of December was in a cafe in Notting Hill over a quite ordinary breakfast, and I cried. This is the only time, apart from childhood scrapes and relationship woes that I have ever wept in public – and this time, it was over a 30-odd page short story. In amongst the clash of prams and the chaos of jammy-fingered children, I sat with my ignored breakfast, a little wobbly-eyed, and thought about people.
The 10 stories in Tenth of December, by George Saunders, are all about people. No matter how weird the setting – a futuristic prison lab, a middle-class home where human lawn ornaments are a great status symbol – Saunders’s stories are always about humanity and the meaning we find in small moments, in objects or gestures. He paints painful portraits of domesticity, of families, of death. It could be described as melancholically happy, each story full of little truths that make us both amused and very uneasy.
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