PIANOS & FLOWERS

'When I was asked by The Sunday Times to write a number of short stories for the newspaper, I suggested that I should select photographs from their extensive photographic archive, and create stories based on what I imagine the pictures depicted... From the tiniest visual clue we can create a whole hinterland of experience - of love, of hope, of simply being human.' We travel to exotic and intriguing places and share the lives of three sisters, brought up in Penang. We read of what happened to them and to their Chinese neighbours caught in the tides of war. We see a group of small boys in a Glasgow slum, their young lives stunted by poverty, and hear how life worked out in contrasting ways for them. We follow a young woman's search for love in the unlikely realm of Egyptian antiquities. 'She is smiling, the young woman perched on the cross-bar; she is smiling broadly as they follow the tram lines... She did not know what possessed her to accept a ride into work from Professor Mactaggart.' Through the through the medium of sepia images, we glimpse a world long departed, the lives of the people in the frame imagined and explored, layer by layer by one of our favourite writers, and who's to say how close to the truth AMS reaches? Stare at the images reproduced in the book and create your own short story. 179pp.