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Elena Marlowe
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Short Stories · 2022

Small Hours, Bright Rooms

Eleven stories about the people who are awake at four in the morning, and what they do with the hour.

Published
2022
Genre
Short Stories
Pages
248
Publisher
Harrowgate Press

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About the book

A night-shift midwife counts contractions and the years since she last spoke to her sister. A widowed translator finds a word she cannot render and decides not to. Two brothers repaint a hallway at three in the morning rather than discuss the funeral. Across eleven stories, Marlowe attends to the hours when the ordinary defences are down and people become briefly, dangerously honest. Spare, warm and formally restless, this collection confirmed her as one of the most precise chroniclers of domestic interior life writing today — a writer who understands that most of a life is conducted in the margins of the day.

From “The Hallway”

At two in the morning Martin decided the hallway was the wrong colour, and because it was two in the morning and their mother was four days dead, Peter agreed with him.

They drove to the all-night place off the ring road and stood a long time in front of a wall of small cardboard squares, each with a name that someone had been paid to invent. Oyster. Elderflower. Quiet Stone. Martin held one up and said, this one, and Peter said, that's the same as what's on it now, and Martin said, no it isn't, and neither of them moved for a while.

Small Hours, Bright Rooms · Elena Marlowe

Praise for Small Hours, Bright Rooms

“Eleven stories, not one wasted sentence. Marlowe writes silence better than most writers manage dialogue.”
The Hollowell Observer
“Devastating in the way a well-made chair is devastating: you only notice the craft when you try to build one.”
Literary Review Quarterly

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