Are They Funny, are They Dead?

A daughter’s life is changed on discovering her adoptive father is in fact her true father; in her imagination, an elderly woman removes the blue mantle from a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, and is delighted to find black lace underneath; a senior academic, about to deliver a lecture to his students, is unsettled by memories of a passionate affair. These spare, elegant, disconcerting stories swerve between the long perspectives of memory and the abrupt questions of children running free: ‘Where does the world go when I am dead?’ Marjorie Ann Watts, the author of a series of books for children, brings to the ambiguities of adult relationships, and the fault-lines between generations, a rare and sharp-witted understanding of how the past remains forever embedded in the present’