Today I’m joining the blog tour for Wasteland Girls. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the blog tour and to the publisher for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Wasteland Girls is a collection of lyrical, incisive and luminous stories by the Sunday Times bestselling author of Tall Bones and Our Last Wild Days.

These stunningly powerful stories explore the wildness and beauty of the American heartlands, a place where lives are lived on the margins, but also where there is dignity, hope, revenge and restitution.

In ‘Long Way to Come for a Sip of Water’, which was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, Texan man Ready drives through a divided US to see his dying brother. Wasteland Girls, the title story, is a powerful tale of a family of hoarders, of magic and revenge. In Yukon 1940, a woman sits beside the body of her husband in a remote cabin, trapped by the frozen sea. The Girl in the Ground follows a woman who suddenly reappears after twenty years of absence, but for whom the past is a void. A widower meets a man who should died many times.

Deeply atmospheric and soulful, the stories in Wasteland Girls are inspired by the author’s experience of living amid the beautiful but often ferocious remote landscapes of the US, and among the wild and secretive people who inhabit them. In the vastness of the wilds, anything can happen…

Review:

I’ve read some of Anna Bailey’s work before and really enjoyed it, so I was intrigued to see how she would handle a collection of short stories: the answer is with aplomb. Most of the stories in the collection are set in the American heartlands, and Anna Bailey’s descriptions of the surroundings are exquisite. I’ve never visited these areas, but the author took me there and I feel I want to go to experience it for myself. 

I don’t often read short stories, but collections like Wasteland Girls make me feel as though I should. Despite the relatively short length of the stories, Anna Bailey is brilliant at constructing her characters in detail and making the reader feel as though they really know them. Her writing is so emotional, and I love the way she conveys her characters’ feelings so strongly and concisely. 

The Wasteland Girls is packed with themes that capture the human condition. Anna Bailey writes about living in poverty, marriage, grief, sexuality and family relationships to list a few, so there is inevitably a theme that will resonate with every reader, and this makes her writing hit hard. 

I’m looking forward to seeing what Anna Bailey does next! 

Wasteland Girls is available from Amazon.

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