Katherine Ashenburg

The hardest thing about the advent of a new collection of stories by A. L. Kennedy — her fifth, called What Becomes — is the search for synonyms for ‘brilliant’. Her uncanny dialogue is as note-perfect as J. D. Salinger’s, her vision as astutely bleak as Alice Munro’s, and her ability to summon up a society in a few strokes rivals William Trevor’s. To these gifts, Kennedy adds a few twists all her own — a relish for the grotesque, sudden splashes of violence, and the kind of contagious, verging-on-hysteria laughter that attends final examinations, wakes and other emergencies. Readers of Kennedy will find the terrain in this collection familiar.

‘Some places are drenched with sorrow,’ a character in The Winter Vault tells his son, and the son reflects that some people are like that too. ‘Some places are drenched with sorrow,’ a character in The Winter Vault tells his son, and the son reflects that some people are like that too. This book is full of sorrowful people and places. Some of the places, the villages sacrificed to create the Aswan Dam and Canada’s St Lawrence Seaway, are literally drowned, leaving thousands homeless, while Warsaw, ruined in the second world war and rebuilt to a Disneyesque twin of its past self, is also submerged in loss.