Wow! What an incredible collection of short stories. I gobbled them up in one sitting, moved, shocked and spellbound. Parental love, grief, guilt and rejection echoes through the tales of Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin, each with a surprising, original twist. Highly recommended.

Short stories are growing on me and this collection was particularly good. Schweblin’s writing is distilled and immensely powerful. She mixes the mundane, everyday with the existential to chilling effect. Nowhere more so than in the opening earth-shattering story, Welcome to the Club, in which a mother, following an attempt at drowning herself, quietly resurfaces and returns to the house to cook an omelette for her children. Hints as to the causes of her depression seep through, and help comes from an unexpected corner. It left me with goosebumps.

Child parent relationships reappear in many of the stories, often shrouded in fear of rejection and guilt. Such as the life changing consequences of a split-second distraction in which a child creeps up on a balcony or ingests a battery. Heavy is the responsibilities that weigh on a parent. There’s horror here but of the everyday kind. Horrors that speak to our deepest fears, such as losing a child.

The final story, A Visit from the Chief, in which an act of kindness towards a dement woman turns into a comically twisted kidnapping involving a perma tanned body-builder, made me laugh. But mostly, these incredible short-stories made me think.

Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin is translated by Megan McDowell and published by Picador, 192 pages.