One of fiction's greatest feats is unearthing the accessible in the exceptional. In the most outlandish novels and stories, there's a speck of humanity with which to identify, a flicker of the familiar. British writer Stuart Evers's Your Father Sends His Love inverts this approach, mining the known for its most haunting and alien particulars, demonstrating that the chasms of the human heart hold mysteries even when it beats inside our own chest.
Much like Jenny Offill, whose praise adorns the book's back cover, Evers's writing focuses on the domestic turned uncanny, ruptures that break the smooth veneer of daily life. In "Live from the Palladium," the collection's final and most moving piece, a young man tries his hand at stand-up, failing miserably until he resigns himself to repeating one of his father's famous comedy routines. While the audience boos and chatters, he sees his mother, "standing now, applauding. Members of the audience are turning to look at her, the crazy woman clapping alone."
These vivid and haunting images are underpinned by tender meditations on family and love. Opener "Lakelands" subverts the reader's expectation when a gruff, downtrodden British laborer embraces his openly gay son without hesitation. Like other stories in the book, "Lakelands" rejects formulaic plot in favor of a snapshot-style glimpse at a few moments in a life--moments that might otherwise seem ordinary, without Evers's lens--as tender, intangible and vital as love itself. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer