Days Like Today - Softcover

Ingalls, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571205909 ISBN 13: 9780571205905

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2002

Synopsis

In this collection of five stories by a great short story writer, prototypes from the ancient world cast a shadow over our age. Cupid and Psyche, Penelope, Oedipus, Icarus and Odysseus inhabit the consciousness of characters who wrestle with betrayal, sacrifice, family conflict and war. Each story poses the same questions: what do people really believe in, where can they put their trust, and why do they continue to hope? Days Like Today is a stunning volume by a true artist and a quite remarkable talent.

About this title

Review:

In this arresting and haunting collection, Days Like Today, wars and their aftermath are in the foreground of each of the stories. In the background are Rachel Ingalls' familiars, the gods of ancient Greece; and yet without a single direct reference, it is their tragedies, duplicities and sacrifices which are evoked so piercingly here.

In the chilling revenge of "Veterans", Franklin's almost apple-pie perfect household is skewered by the arrival of Sherman, a dead-beat sponger whom Franklin had saved in the Korean war; in the novella "No Love Lost", a dystopia of such horror that survival is reduced to endless pitiless brutalities, a father feels he can offer no protection and no hope for his children's future; the meanings of eternity and survival are transmogrified into two women's exchanges about biology over the washing up in "Fertility".

Ingalls' distinctively realised characters, including a self-deluding war correspondent and a dogmatic Greek-American patriarch and the thoughtful working of these plots, create a disquiet, a tension pulled dangerously tight, to give her stories of "days like today" an epic dimension. Rachel Ingalls is too accomplished a writer to issue warnings for the 21stcentury; nonetheless, this admirably subtle collection offers a rich meditation on responsibility, fate and the extraordinary survival of love. --Ruth Petrie

Book Description:

Days Like Today by Rachel Ingalls is a stunning volume of short stories by a true artist and a remarkable talent.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0571205909
• ISBN 13: 9780571205905
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304