If you read only one collection of short stories this year make it this one! They left me with a deep feeling of isolation and alienation - very impressive, rather bleak snapshots of life as an exile.
Extract
One day, he thought he had glimpsed in the gaze of his characters, his painted creatures, a mistrust and fear he had not seen in the models posing for him. The ambiguous distance, so beloved of Henry James, that art introduces between reality and its representation, in his case only seemed to add this look of suspicion, and it made his portraits unbearable by infecting them with a silent solitary unease: his own.
