![]() ![]() To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at. No Love Lost by Rachel Ingalls is published by Faber (£9.99). One story ends with people destroying “the world which, until just a few moments before, had been theirs” – but from such destruction Ingalls confects delicious creations. ![]() I say stories, but the fictions in this new selection of her. Elsewhere, the blackness of Ingalls’s vision is offset by brutal comedy, whether through rains of toads ( Friends in the Country) or in her pitch-perfect ear for an ending, which never fails her. B ehind the generic titles of Rachel Ingalls’s stories lies an eccentric world of strange people who are just like you and me. ![]() An exception is the title story, an uncharacteristically dense and sombre tale of a family struggling in the aftermath of war. Log in or sign up for Facebook to connect with friends, family and people you know. Most of the stories are pacy and dialogue-heavy, so they slip down nicely just before a horrifying revelation makes them catch in your throat. A new selection of novellas by Rachel Ingalls, the rediscovered late author of cult classic ‘Mrs Caliban’. At least half the pieces here are as satisfying as Ingalls’s masterpiece Mrs Caliban, which in 1986 was named one of the 20 outstanding postwar US novels by the British Book Marketing Council, alongside the likes of Humboldt’s Gift, Invisible Man and Song of Solomon. Ingalls had a prescient eye for subject matter: In the Act features a sex robot coming between a husband and wife (battling couples are fertile territory here) decades before Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. The blackness of Ingalls’s vision is offset by brutal comedy and her pitch-perfect ear for an ending ![]()
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