Field Study

Description

From the author of The Dark Room comes a strikingly powerful collection of stories exploring themes of guilt, love and sacrifice with a haunting emotional precision. With a range of settings as diverse as the Scottish seaside and post-Communist eastern Germany Seiffert uses the locations of these stories to bring her characters into relief. Powerfully evoking our human need for connection, Field Study takes us on journeys that demonstrate both the fragility and adaptability of our emotions, as well as the vast potential for danger and vulnerability created by all types of love - familial, platonic or romantic. Seiffert isolates and captures not only the underlying and compelling sorrow of love, but also the joy and desire for that love that keeps us alive.

The daughter of an Australian father and a German mother, Rachel Seiffert was born in Oxford and lives in London. She is the author the Booker-shortlisted novel The Dark Room - which won a Betty Trask Award and the Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction - and the novel Afterwards. She was named one of Granta's 'Best of Young British' and one of 25 women writers to watch in the 'Orange Futures' promotion.

A magnificent collection: striking, moving, and deeply thought-provoking * Financial Times * Seiffert is a writer of great delicacy and toughness...good story begetting good story after good story * Guardian * It is extraordinary to experience these fictions... Not even the achievement of The Dark Room, its maturity and courage, will quite prepare the reader for the subtle art at work throughout these stories * Irish Times * Vivid, just and heartfelt * Daily Telegraph * 'The Crossing' has all the leanness of Hemingway's short fiction... In Seiffert's hands, the tale becomes a tense parable set at the dangerous intersection of trust, desperation and xenophobia * New York Times Book Review *