Stuart Coop

I mean, there was a lot of books, but one that really stunned me on every level was, and I suspect it's probably my favourite book of 2018, was a collection of short stories.

I read a lot of short stories.

I dipped into a big collection of Thomas McGuane's short stories this year, Tom Jones' short stories, but a guy I'd never heard of called Scott O'Connor, and a book called A Perfect Universe, which is just 10 stories...

set in and around Los Angeles.

And the opening story just stopped me because it starts with a scene where this guy is just hearing his name being called, but he's hearing dozens and dozens of other names being called.

And you're kind of going, what's happening here?

And then we realise that he's been in an earthquake.

So it's this whole, you know, he's lying there for a couple of days and he ends up, without giving too much away, you know, he survives.

He comes out.

He's the only person who survives this earthquake.

He's in a, you know, shopping set or a building or something like that.

And then it goes off into this weird tangent where he's also a musician.

And because he's now got the celebrity of being the only survivor of this earthquake...

the band want to get back together.

This sounds not breathtaking.

No, this is great.

But I was just, and it goes on and on and it's about 15 pages and I got to the end of it and I went, wow.

You know, all of this is in 15 beautifully concise, very heart-wrenching but also surreal and very touching and very immediate moments

pages and then scott o'connor just goes on and then you know there's one there's one story that i found really um affecting where it's just a scenario in a cafe early in the morning and there's people serving coffee and getting food and customers waiting for coffee then there's a gunshot

And it's about, you know, the thing that always attracted me to contemporary crime fiction, you know, not the whodunit side of it but the random incidents that anyone can find themselves in at a particular time and place which is completely out of their control.