An Unfamiliar Landscape by Amanda Huggins

 

An Unfamiliar Landscape by Amanda Huggins.

Published 6th October 2022 by Valley Press.

From the cover of the book:

Stories from the city, the sea, the forest; stories from places where everything is not always as it first appears… 

From a rain-soaked Berlin to a neon-lit Tokyo, the midwest of North America to the Parisian backstreets, a suburban London kitchen to a fishing village on the Yorkshire coast, wherever these characters are travelling from or to, they are all navigating unfamiliar ground in search of answers. 

These are stories of yearning to belong, of the urge to escape – tales of grief and alienation, of loss and betrayal, love and hope.

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A new book from Amanda Huggins is always guaranteed to be a treat for the senses, so I was really looking forward to reading this brand new collection of short stories, An Unfamiliar Landscape.

Huggins likes to take her readers around the world in her short story collections, which is just what these tales do, stopping more than once in Japan, and on the North Yorkshire coast, which are my favourite locations as backdrops for her writing. 

The locations may be diverse, the characters different in each one, and the trials and tribulations they face unrelated, but there is an intriguing theme that ties them together. In each one, the characters reach a pivotal moment in their lives, when something happens to make them look at a situation, a relationship, or themselves, in a different way. The sudden change of perspective in each one hits you with emotionally charged force, whether it be a positive change towards hope and connection, or a plummet towards isolation and despair. 

They are all thoroughly compelling in their own way, especially the ones that delve deep into loss in its many forms, and I love the way Huggins plays with the pull of the sea (one of may favourite things about her stories), and the natural world, in many of them. I adored them all, but there are special mentions for these: two stories that made me sob, The Names of the Missing, and Swimming to the Other Side, which are probably the most poignant of the bunch; Eating Unobserved, set in the Parisian backstreets, and oozing with understated passion and longing; and that starkly contrasting Waiting to Fall and People Like You, which are both set in room 409 of Ragwood Hall hotel (Amanda, I am so ready for a whole series of stories about room 409!).

There are stories here to please everyone, whether you like them warm and cosy, dark, sad, or uplifting, and whatever your pleasure I defy you to get to the end without having run the whole gamut of the emotional range. That is pretty impressive for a collection packed in a book a smidge over 150 pages.

Every time I review something by Amanda Huggins I say what a huge fan I am of her work. I make no apologies for repeating these sentiments once more. I swallowed this tasty morsel whole, and think it might be my favourite Huggins' short story collection yet.

An Unfamiliar Landscape is available to buy now in paperback and ebook formats, from your favourite book seller, or direct from Valley Press HERE.

Thank you to Amanda Huggins and Valley Press for sending me a paperback copy of this book in return for an honest review.

About the author:

Amanda Huggins is the author of the novellas Crossing the Lines and All Our Squandered Beauty, both of which won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella, in 2021 and 2022 respectively. She has also published three collections of short fiction – Brightly Coloured Horses, Separated From the Sea and Scratched Enamel Heart, and a poetry collection, The Collective Nouns for Birds, which won the 2020 Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Scratched Enamel Heart includes her COSTA SHORT STORY AWARD prize-winning story, 'Red'.

Amanda's work has been published in fiction and poetry anthologies, travel guides, text books and literary magazines, as well as in The Guardian, The Telegraph, Reader's Digest, Take a Break’s Fiction Feast, Traveller, Popshot, Mslexia, Wanderlust, Tokyo Weekender and Writers' Forum. Her work has also been broadcast on BBC radio.

Her travel writing has won several awards, notably the British Guild of Travel Writers New Travel Writer of the Year Award in 2014, and she has twice been a finalist in the Bradt Travel Writer of the Year Award. Her flash fiction has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Fish Prize and was included in the 2019/20 BIFFY50 list of the fifty best UK flash fictions. In 2020 Amanda won the Colm Toibin International Short Story Award, and in 2021 she won the H E Bates Short Story Prize and was a runner-up in the Fish Short Story Prize and the annual Writers in Kyoto prize.

Her next short story collection, An Unfamiliar Landscape, will be published in October 2022 by Valley Press, and her full-length poetry collection, Talk to Me about When We Were Perfect, will be published in 2023 by Victorina Press.