Short story collections: From the earthy to the supernatural

'Healy’s stories are short on plot but full of emotional intensity and worth the effort'

Penguin Books is celebrating its 80th birthday this year (Rex)

“Arrival” is a fitting theme for the first issue of Freeman’s (Grove Press UK, £10.99), the bi-annual anthology from former Granta magazine editor John Freeman. With millions of people around the world fleeing conflicts, it’s a topical one too, and Aleksandar Hemon contributes a memorable piece about his parents’ experiences since they arrived in Canada as Bosnian refugees in the 1990s. Freeman wants each issue of Freeman’s (I can’t decide whether I find the name charming or egotistical) to be “a collection of writing that will carry you” and he draws on his illustrious contacts to ensure that happens. Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, Dave Eggers, David Mitchell, Haruki Murakami and other world beaters are here.

Alongside writers from America, Brazil, Israel, Palestine and elsewhere, Britain is well-represented by Kamila Shamsie’s unsettling account of travelling in Pakistan and Helen Simpson’s witty story, “Arizona”, in which two women bring fresh perspectives to ageing. That said, the famous names, and glossy Granta-like production, are almost a drawback.

One of the joys of reading magazines like n+1 is discovering astonishing pieces by complete unknowns but, while Freeman’s has one of these in Sudanese writer Fatin Abbas, many of its contributors can be read in The New Yorker. A solid start but future issues will benefit from a more even balance between new and established voices.

At times, while reading Dermot Healy’s The Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive, £10), I felt some of the frisson of discovery. I’d never read Healy before but, as the title indicates, he isn’t a new writer; he died last year, aged 66, having published novels and poetry, and his stories “show the evolution of his subtle and complex style,” according to his editors. Both those adjectives apply to “First Snow of the Year,” the opening story, which is initially confusing but, eventually, adds up to a tense and poignant evocation of loss against a backdrop of rural poverty.

Committed to the modernist directive to “make it new”, Healy’s prose frequently overreaches. “The begging trees on the mountain crisp as a child’s brain,” is one image I can’t see (although perhaps other readers will?). But, elsewhere, he captures sensations with precision: “Going over the bridges there was a great empty feeling beneath your heart as the car rose.” His stories are short on plot but full of emotional intensity. They evoke acres of hard-scrabble experience, in Ireland and London, and are generally worth the effort.

The same cannot be said of Those Were the Days (Pan Macmillan, £12.99) – Terry Wogan’s odd collection of connected stories about a bank manager. Tom isn’t avaricious but instead the old fashioned type of banker who knows his customers and would never give “a loan or overdraft of more than 10 per cent of your total assets”. We meet Tom on Opening Day as customers file into his Cattle Market branch, triggering his memories of pleasanter times. It’s sentimental stuff and Wogan’s attempt to transfer to the page the kind of warmth he brings to broadcasting comes off as trite.

As slim volumes go, The Visitors Book (Sort of Books, £8.99) by Sophie Hannah is a more rewarding option. These four ghost stories exhibit the imagination that’s made Hannah a best-selling author of crime fiction. In the title story, a man demands that his girlfriend sign the visitors’ book at his terraced house and, from this amusing premise, the plot reaches a surprising and sinister denouement. The twist is more predictable in “All the Dead Mothers of My Daughter’s Friends” but, with its brilliant title, this gothic comedy, which distils the “deadly light-hearted” tone of competitive parents, will prove cathartic for anybody who’s ever waited at the school gate and felt like they were losing their mind.