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Openings
'One of the finest short-storywriters at work today. These stories are honest, finely nuanced and indelible in their impact.'
WENDY ERSKINE
'You'll lose yourself in this collection and, most likely, find yourself too. Each story is a masterclass in attentiveness.'
JAN CARSON
The much-anticipated new collection from the BBC National Short Story Award-winning author of Multitudes and Intimacies.
I still sometimes wonder if one could draw a window in the wall, or in the air, and step through it together. To somewhere else, entirely new.
From a passionate affair in Blitz-era London, to a highly charged Christmas party in Belfast, to a trip to Marrakech which could form a new family, the thirteen striking stories of Openings pulse with possibility and illuminate those fleeting but recognisable moments of heartbreak and hope that can change the course of a life.
'It takes a writer as subtle, compassionate and clear-eyed as Caldwell to track the hidden forces that work upon us, to illuminate our secret selves. This is prose that liberates.'
CLAIRE KILROY
'Caldwell has a glorious skill for creating narratives in which every element works in perfect tandem.'
SUNDAY TIMES
WENDY ERSKINE
'You'll lose yourself in this collection and, most likely, find yourself too. Each story is a masterclass in attentiveness.'
JAN CARSON
The much-anticipated new collection from the BBC National Short Story Award-winning author of Multitudes and Intimacies.
I still sometimes wonder if one could draw a window in the wall, or in the air, and step through it together. To somewhere else, entirely new.
From a passionate affair in Blitz-era London, to a highly charged Christmas party in Belfast, to a trip to Marrakech which could form a new family, the thirteen striking stories of Openings pulse with possibility and illuminate those fleeting but recognisable moments of heartbreak and hope that can change the course of a life.
'It takes a writer as subtle, compassionate and clear-eyed as Caldwell to track the hidden forces that work upon us, to illuminate our secret selves. This is prose that liberates.'
CLAIRE KILROY
'Caldwell has a glorious skill for creating narratives in which every element works in perfect tandem.'
SUNDAY TIMES
215 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 30, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
August 25, 2024
Loved these stories, felt modern, fresh and real. Very well written and touched on feelings that are hard to articulate.
July 4, 2024
I was initially a little underwhelmed by this collection (especially because I love love love her other collections!) but the last few stories really won me over again. My favourite stories of hers are the ones that are the most mundane: Mother’s Day, Bibi, Daphne, and Cuddies were brilliant. Even the title of the first story, “If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now� made me ache a little.
Unlike her previous collections it wasn’t immediately clear to me what was the core of the collection was, with Intimacies depicting girlhood and Multitudes motherhood. Yet slowly, repeated questions seemed to emerge: what do we now? When everything’s settled and static? When everything that’s supposed to have happened already has? Can we really return home? The range of stories made this collection maybe more ambitious than her others, yet feel a little less complete.
Jan Carson’s influence seems clear in the magical realism element of a few of the stories - I wasn’t really sure about Counting Sheep or Something’s Coming, but I thought this worked well in The Chosen. (This story seemed to be another departure from her earlier work - when reading Multitudes I never got the impression that characters� fears could be realised - but in Openings I did).
Overall, I’m excited to find all the things I missed on my re-read! (And also excited to read in twenty years time and see what I think then.) Thanks for another brilliant collection, Lucy Caldwell!!!
Unlike her previous collections it wasn’t immediately clear to me what was the core of the collection was, with Intimacies depicting girlhood and Multitudes motherhood. Yet slowly, repeated questions seemed to emerge: what do we now? When everything’s settled and static? When everything that’s supposed to have happened already has? Can we really return home? The range of stories made this collection maybe more ambitious than her others, yet feel a little less complete.
Jan Carson’s influence seems clear in the magical realism element of a few of the stories - I wasn’t really sure about Counting Sheep or Something’s Coming, but I thought this worked well in The Chosen. (This story seemed to be another departure from her earlier work - when reading Multitudes I never got the impression that characters� fears could be realised - but in Openings I did).
Overall, I’m excited to find all the things I missed on my re-read! (And also excited to read in twenty years time and see what I think then.) Thanks for another brilliant collection, Lucy Caldwell!!!
May 24, 2024
Like many people, I came to Lucy Caldwell in 2021 when 'All the People Were Mean and Bad' won the BBC Short Story Award, and so I read her previous collections, Multitudes and Intimacies, in one go. Openings is the first one I've had to wait for -- but also one I've come to after using those first two books (published five years apart) to build myself a sense of her fictive world, her voice, her concerns, and so on. In a sense, Openings is not just a collection in its own right to me, but the next stage of someone's weltanshauung: I was almost holding my breath as I began it, waiting to see how she'd developed. And I knew I would be disappointed if she hadn't.
Multitudes and Intimacies each had a tight narrative focus: although they were story collections, they felt cohesive, like a concept album. Multitudes was gathered around female coming-of-age, Intimacies was about the psyche in the maelstrom of new motherhood; Openings, from this perspective, felt at first almost scattershot. Here was a story about covid lockdowns, here a magic realist tale about a grandmother becoming a tree, here a postmodern historical metanarrative, here a tightly-timed domestic drama about a young woman entering possible stepmotherhood. Within these, though there are shared concerns, it's more that they feel like repeated themes - motifs in a piece of music - than like honed, focalised 'subject matter', as they did in Caldwell's previous collections. And while I found the collection harder to get into at first because of this, as it went on, and with re-reading, I've come to see it as the result of an opening for, or from, Lucy Caldwell herself, into a broader creative world.
Caldwell is especially concerned, here, with women reaching early middle-age as they leave the contained chaos of toddlers and babies, and enter the more nuanced, emotionally discursive space of children -- arguments between siblings, between kids and adults, a sense of a child's self fixing and plateauing, and that child stepping out from the shadow of the mother into being a separate, at times unknowable, being. At this stage, the mothers in Caldwell's work now find themselves on a brink, or a border, looking both ways: they look back at their mothers, and at themselves as children, and reconsider what they thought was happening when they were young; they become children and adults at once, parents and daughters, each informed by the other - double-selves in flux as the memory of the former child-self, and the former mother, and the positions of the current self and current child, influence one another.
The stories do this subtly, in ways that require patience and re-reading. I knew something was up when both the collection's first story, 'If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now', and title story, 'Openings', both left me initially cold. But where you start and what you name the whole thing after -- surely they must matter? So I went back to them. And slowly the images, the patterning, Caldwell's quiet way of using a small incident to stand in for the unspoken emotional resonance of the story's undercurrent, all began to reveal themselves. In one, a mother of young children, separated from her own mother by distance, sickness and the pandemic, collects a kitten from the neighbour and sees the drama of separation and reunion played out between the mother and baby. (The quietness with which Caldwell gives us this reunion, the delicacy with which the narrator observes it, and what she doesn't think in that moment, all mean the symbol wasn't immediately obvious to me.) In the other, a mother in the unsure space of marital separation, on the last day before the children go to their father's, has "one of those days" where everything slips from its moorings, and she has to forcibly enter into this looseness and reconsider her new self, an escape from a set of conditions that she didn't wholeheartedly choose for herself. Both of these stories, on first reading, feel slightly ephemeral, and even dissatisfying -- there are images that come and go, no particular tight plot but rather a series of incidents that don't even seem to escalate, and people who enter the story for a few lines of dialogue and leave again. And while these qualities don't necessarily feel like the more tightly schematic "well-made story" of some of her earlier works, I ended up admiring them more, and admiring how philosophical Caldwell was willing to get within such (supposedly) prosaic surroundings.
(Another interesting theme running through the collection is the appearance of Northern Ireland not as a nation or a political identity, but as mood and a culture; as an environment of landscape and language and weather and personal interaction. Caldwell drops in words like "guldered", "drookit" and "wee", she writes of sea wind and briny rain and Belfast streets where the people shift between kindness and guarded humour, in a way that's very evocative. It's interesting to me that her earlier books did this less: the "London Irish" in 'Intimacies' don't feel drawn with as much investment as they do here. I don't know enough about the situation but I do wonder if we're watching Northern Irish fiction in general wrestle with an identity that, for those who grew up in the 80s and 90s, was highly politicised and black-and-white, something to be defended or abandoned, and who now have the distance to ask what they've lost, what they might want back, and are trying to capture the place differently while reassessing their relationship with it.)
For me the two strongest stories - the big-hitters, most clearly ambitious and emotionally wrenching - are 'Daylight Raids' and 'Bibi'. The former is a story of the Blitz and WW2 in London, some of it feeling very much like it comes out of Elizabeth Bowen's 'Mysterious Kor' and how Bowen writes Regent's Park at the start of 'The Death of the Heart'. But Caldwell plays with perspective and perception from the off, peeling back the layers of drama to explore historical research, how and why we tell stories, what can be made of what it available. Caldwell herself, or an authorial "I" that might be constructed, narrates 'Daylight Raids', commenting not just on the characters but on the story's progression - both in terms of the real-time dramatic space and its process of being imagined, written, drafted. 'Bibi' is the story that feels closest in tone and outlook to 'All the People Were Mean and Bad', the story of a woman in her earliest thirties, on holiday with her older, still quite new, boyfriend, and his three daughters, whose mother passed away five years ago. It's a masterpiece of withheld and revealed information, raising questions in the reader's mind and answering them at just the right emotionally impactful moment; sending the not-stepmother to an inescapable crescendo where she must truly ask what her position is with this family, and then, at the end, finding a beautiful, surprising way to develop the questions it raises and bring the protagonist to an open-ended resolution. For me it's the best story in the collection, and probably the best story of Caldwell's career so far.
There are a couple of stories I wasn't quite so taken with even on a second reading - in a book of almost 250 pages (the last two collections were more like 150 pages each) this seems inevitable - and I didn't think there needed to be thirteen stories (both previous books had eleven). But the overall strengths far outweigh the occasional weakness of a story that makes you shrug, and it's good to see one of the UK's foremost short fiction writers developing her stories in interesting new ways, finding new depths and wisdom in its changing form.
Multitudes and Intimacies each had a tight narrative focus: although they were story collections, they felt cohesive, like a concept album. Multitudes was gathered around female coming-of-age, Intimacies was about the psyche in the maelstrom of new motherhood; Openings, from this perspective, felt at first almost scattershot. Here was a story about covid lockdowns, here a magic realist tale about a grandmother becoming a tree, here a postmodern historical metanarrative, here a tightly-timed domestic drama about a young woman entering possible stepmotherhood. Within these, though there are shared concerns, it's more that they feel like repeated themes - motifs in a piece of music - than like honed, focalised 'subject matter', as they did in Caldwell's previous collections. And while I found the collection harder to get into at first because of this, as it went on, and with re-reading, I've come to see it as the result of an opening for, or from, Lucy Caldwell herself, into a broader creative world.
Caldwell is especially concerned, here, with women reaching early middle-age as they leave the contained chaos of toddlers and babies, and enter the more nuanced, emotionally discursive space of children -- arguments between siblings, between kids and adults, a sense of a child's self fixing and plateauing, and that child stepping out from the shadow of the mother into being a separate, at times unknowable, being. At this stage, the mothers in Caldwell's work now find themselves on a brink, or a border, looking both ways: they look back at their mothers, and at themselves as children, and reconsider what they thought was happening when they were young; they become children and adults at once, parents and daughters, each informed by the other - double-selves in flux as the memory of the former child-self, and the former mother, and the positions of the current self and current child, influence one another.
The stories do this subtly, in ways that require patience and re-reading. I knew something was up when both the collection's first story, 'If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now', and title story, 'Openings', both left me initially cold. But where you start and what you name the whole thing after -- surely they must matter? So I went back to them. And slowly the images, the patterning, Caldwell's quiet way of using a small incident to stand in for the unspoken emotional resonance of the story's undercurrent, all began to reveal themselves. In one, a mother of young children, separated from her own mother by distance, sickness and the pandemic, collects a kitten from the neighbour and sees the drama of separation and reunion played out between the mother and baby. (The quietness with which Caldwell gives us this reunion, the delicacy with which the narrator observes it, and what she doesn't think in that moment, all mean the symbol wasn't immediately obvious to me.) In the other, a mother in the unsure space of marital separation, on the last day before the children go to their father's, has "one of those days" where everything slips from its moorings, and she has to forcibly enter into this looseness and reconsider her new self, an escape from a set of conditions that she didn't wholeheartedly choose for herself. Both of these stories, on first reading, feel slightly ephemeral, and even dissatisfying -- there are images that come and go, no particular tight plot but rather a series of incidents that don't even seem to escalate, and people who enter the story for a few lines of dialogue and leave again. And while these qualities don't necessarily feel like the more tightly schematic "well-made story" of some of her earlier works, I ended up admiring them more, and admiring how philosophical Caldwell was willing to get within such (supposedly) prosaic surroundings.
(Another interesting theme running through the collection is the appearance of Northern Ireland not as a nation or a political identity, but as mood and a culture; as an environment of landscape and language and weather and personal interaction. Caldwell drops in words like "guldered", "drookit" and "wee", she writes of sea wind and briny rain and Belfast streets where the people shift between kindness and guarded humour, in a way that's very evocative. It's interesting to me that her earlier books did this less: the "London Irish" in 'Intimacies' don't feel drawn with as much investment as they do here. I don't know enough about the situation but I do wonder if we're watching Northern Irish fiction in general wrestle with an identity that, for those who grew up in the 80s and 90s, was highly politicised and black-and-white, something to be defended or abandoned, and who now have the distance to ask what they've lost, what they might want back, and are trying to capture the place differently while reassessing their relationship with it.)
For me the two strongest stories - the big-hitters, most clearly ambitious and emotionally wrenching - are 'Daylight Raids' and 'Bibi'. The former is a story of the Blitz and WW2 in London, some of it feeling very much like it comes out of Elizabeth Bowen's 'Mysterious Kor' and how Bowen writes Regent's Park at the start of 'The Death of the Heart'. But Caldwell plays with perspective and perception from the off, peeling back the layers of drama to explore historical research, how and why we tell stories, what can be made of what it available. Caldwell herself, or an authorial "I" that might be constructed, narrates 'Daylight Raids', commenting not just on the characters but on the story's progression - both in terms of the real-time dramatic space and its process of being imagined, written, drafted. 'Bibi' is the story that feels closest in tone and outlook to 'All the People Were Mean and Bad', the story of a woman in her earliest thirties, on holiday with her older, still quite new, boyfriend, and his three daughters, whose mother passed away five years ago. It's a masterpiece of withheld and revealed information, raising questions in the reader's mind and answering them at just the right emotionally impactful moment; sending the not-stepmother to an inescapable crescendo where she must truly ask what her position is with this family, and then, at the end, finding a beautiful, surprising way to develop the questions it raises and bring the protagonist to an open-ended resolution. For me it's the best story in the collection, and probably the best story of Caldwell's career so far.
There are a couple of stories I wasn't quite so taken with even on a second reading - in a book of almost 250 pages (the last two collections were more like 150 pages each) this seems inevitable - and I didn't think there needed to be thirteen stories (both previous books had eleven). But the overall strengths far outweigh the occasional weakness of a story that makes you shrug, and it's good to see one of the UK's foremost short fiction writers developing her stories in interesting new ways, finding new depths and wisdom in its changing form.
April 3, 2025
Fabulous read, these stories are full of emotional intelligence that have you thinking about them long after finishing them. The mixture of time periods and family situations switch with each story and a roller coaster of emotions, memories and feelings.
December 8, 2024
A luminous collection of thirteen stories that delve into the intricate, often unspoken facets of motherhood, marriage, love, and longing. Each story feels like a window into lives grappling with quiet, yet profound moments of change. From a grandmother who transforms into a tree to a tightly crafted domestic drama about stepmotherhood, Caldwell masterfully captures the deeply human experiences that are often difficult to articulate.
What sets Caldwell apart is her extraordinary ability to give voice to emotions that elude easy expression—grief, estrangement, yearning, and the weight of transitions. Through precise, lyrical prose, she makes the intangible tangible, creating narratives that are understated yet emotionally resonant. Her stories, such as “Something’s Coming� and “Openings�, feel like finely tuned instruments, revealing their depths in subtle notes. In “Daylight Raids�, Caldwell reaches back to the Blitz, weaving an ambitious and heart-wrenching story that lingers long after reading.
Caldwell’s exploration of parenthood is particularly compelling, addressing the layered experiences of mothers navigating their own childhood memories, their children’s growing independence, and the messy intersections of past and present identities. Whether writing about the claustrophobic chaos of toddlers or the quieter heartbreaks of midlife, she examines these moments with clarity, warmth, and a remarkable empathy.
While each story stands on its own, the collection as a whole is unified by its emotional honesty and a quiet sense of hope, even amidst life’s uncertainties. With Openings, Caldwell solidifies her place as a writer who understands the profound power of the unsaid, transforming the ordinary into something extraordinary. This is a collection that rewards patience and reflection, offering new insights with each story and leaving a lasting impression.
What sets Caldwell apart is her extraordinary ability to give voice to emotions that elude easy expression—grief, estrangement, yearning, and the weight of transitions. Through precise, lyrical prose, she makes the intangible tangible, creating narratives that are understated yet emotionally resonant. Her stories, such as “Something’s Coming� and “Openings�, feel like finely tuned instruments, revealing their depths in subtle notes. In “Daylight Raids�, Caldwell reaches back to the Blitz, weaving an ambitious and heart-wrenching story that lingers long after reading.
Caldwell’s exploration of parenthood is particularly compelling, addressing the layered experiences of mothers navigating their own childhood memories, their children’s growing independence, and the messy intersections of past and present identities. Whether writing about the claustrophobic chaos of toddlers or the quieter heartbreaks of midlife, she examines these moments with clarity, warmth, and a remarkable empathy.
While each story stands on its own, the collection as a whole is unified by its emotional honesty and a quiet sense of hope, even amidst life’s uncertainties. With Openings, Caldwell solidifies her place as a writer who understands the profound power of the unsaid, transforming the ordinary into something extraordinary. This is a collection that rewards patience and reflection, offering new insights with each story and leaving a lasting impression.
July 24, 2024
I have to admit, I wasn’t so sure of the stories when I started this collection, especially since I loved, loved, loved her previous collection, Intimacies.
My interest started to increase with the creepy doll story “Something’s Coming� and solidified with the CERN-inspired, “Dark Matters�.
But beginning with “Daylight Raids� till the end of the book (with my favourites being “Bibi�, “Lay Me Down� and “Mother’s Day�), you’ll find stories that’ll silently seep into your bones with their subtle layers and cues. As I’ve said on BlueSky, there are stories in here that I want to emulate.
If you were lucky enough to get a limited edition with the extra story, “The Chosen�, you’ll scream with delight. ;)
My interest started to increase with the creepy doll story “Something’s Coming� and solidified with the CERN-inspired, “Dark Matters�.
But beginning with “Daylight Raids� till the end of the book (with my favourites being “Bibi�, “Lay Me Down� and “Mother’s Day�), you’ll find stories that’ll silently seep into your bones with their subtle layers and cues. As I’ve said on BlueSky, there are stories in here that I want to emulate.
If you were lucky enough to get a limited edition with the extra story, “The Chosen�, you’ll scream with delight. ;)
January 5, 2025
(4.5 rounded up) - favourite stories: fiction, unter den linden, daphne
September 17, 2024
My first favourite short stories book ❤️
July 10, 2024
This book was interesting, definitely mid. Very Irish which was a fun read in Ireland & being able to understand the culture more. Each story was interesting and would take me a page or two in to get what the story was saying.
I honestly was a judge a book by a cover for this one which is why I picked it up in the first place (I’m a sucker for good marketing what can I say).
My favorite piece was definitely “openings�, each story has similar themes of a woman & the difficult/messy feelings she has.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book to anyone just because it wasn’t amazing, but I’d say it was entertaining at times. Glad to be done with it :)
I honestly was a judge a book by a cover for this one which is why I picked it up in the first place (I’m a sucker for good marketing what can I say).
My favorite piece was definitely “openings�, each story has similar themes of a woman & the difficult/messy feelings she has.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book to anyone just because it wasn’t amazing, but I’d say it was entertaining at times. Glad to be done with it :)
February 25, 2025
Three years ago, I read and loved Intimacies, an insightful, beautifully written collection of stories by the award-winning, Belfast-born writer Lucy Caldwell. (I genuinely think she is one of the best short-story writers working today.)
While Intimacies focused on pregnancy and the early years of motherhood, Caldwell’s latest collection, Openings, seems more concerned with a slightly later stage of parenthood � again, predominantly from the female perspective. Here we see women grappling with the demands of a more established family, balancing the challenges of motherhood with their own personal desires as they enter middle age. (There are other preoccupations, too, which I’ll try to touch on later in this review.) Irrespective of the connecting themes, it’s another excellent collection of short fiction � subtler and more ambitious in style than Intimacies, reflecting Caldwell’s ongoing development as a writer with a strong command of her craft.
These are quiet, understated stories, often focusing on everyday preoccupations and concerns. (Readers seeking plot-driven stories that turn on unexpected twists will be better served elsewhere.) Nevertheless, what marks these stories out is their subtle insight, humanity and emotional truthfulness. Caldwell has a genuine ability to convey feelings that are often difficult to articulate or remain unexpressed, such as fear, loss, isolation, estrangement and the unsettling nature of change. In particular, she writes insightfully about how parenthood can trigger a multitude of emotions, from joy, pride and fulfilment to doubt, uncertainty, protectiveness and fear.
Some stories feature mothers assailed by childhood memories of their own maternal care while also trying to cope with motherhood themselves � in other words, how our past experiences of being mothered reflect on the here and now. In Mother’s Day, one of the most affecting stories in the collection, a married woman with two young sons must come to terms with her mother’s devastating actions many years before, while also worrying if she might follow suit.
I turned forty. Here I was: exactly the age she’d been, and we were getting closer to what I always privately thought of as my mother’s day. I started to have the recurring dream that plagues me at that time of year � every year since her death I’ve had it, without fail, and it builds in frequency and intensity until I wake up sweating, even screaming. (p. 228)
It’s an excellent story, highlighting how profoundly our childhood experiences can continue to haunt us, shaping our mindsets as we navigate adulthood.
In Something’s Coming, a married woman has persuaded her husband and their two young sons to come on a simple family holiday to Ireland, just like those she remembers from her youth. The trip is also a chance for the couple to reconnect, to have time to talk without juggling childcare and work commitments in the hubbub of London life.
As the story opens, the family are lost in the middle of nowhere, caught in inclement weather, their tempers fraying. At one point, the narrator is reminded of her deceased mother, whom she misses deeply, blurring the borders between motherhood and childhood, albeit momentarily.
‘Isn’t this an adventure,� I said brightly. I raised my voice above the noise of the car and the wind and the rain to say it, and the voice that came out wasn’t mine: it was my mum’s. For a vertiginous second she was me and I was a child again and it was impossible that I’d grown up, married, somehow had kids of my own � impossible that I ever would do so. The car seemed to stop moving. Everything seemed to stop as if none of it, this, was real. (p. 35)
As this very unsettling story unfolds, the narrator is haunted by creepy doll her sons picked up in a local shop, tapping into suppressed fears she tries to keep hidden�
In Cuddies, Caldwell explores motherhood from a somewhat different but equally interesting angle. In this piece, a married woman whose life is devoted to her three young daughters is persuaded by her husband to join a friend’s 40th birthday weekend, albeit rather reluctantly.
To read the rest of my review, please visit:
While Intimacies focused on pregnancy and the early years of motherhood, Caldwell’s latest collection, Openings, seems more concerned with a slightly later stage of parenthood � again, predominantly from the female perspective. Here we see women grappling with the demands of a more established family, balancing the challenges of motherhood with their own personal desires as they enter middle age. (There are other preoccupations, too, which I’ll try to touch on later in this review.) Irrespective of the connecting themes, it’s another excellent collection of short fiction � subtler and more ambitious in style than Intimacies, reflecting Caldwell’s ongoing development as a writer with a strong command of her craft.
These are quiet, understated stories, often focusing on everyday preoccupations and concerns. (Readers seeking plot-driven stories that turn on unexpected twists will be better served elsewhere.) Nevertheless, what marks these stories out is their subtle insight, humanity and emotional truthfulness. Caldwell has a genuine ability to convey feelings that are often difficult to articulate or remain unexpressed, such as fear, loss, isolation, estrangement and the unsettling nature of change. In particular, she writes insightfully about how parenthood can trigger a multitude of emotions, from joy, pride and fulfilment to doubt, uncertainty, protectiveness and fear.
Some stories feature mothers assailed by childhood memories of their own maternal care while also trying to cope with motherhood themselves � in other words, how our past experiences of being mothered reflect on the here and now. In Mother’s Day, one of the most affecting stories in the collection, a married woman with two young sons must come to terms with her mother’s devastating actions many years before, while also worrying if she might follow suit.
I turned forty. Here I was: exactly the age she’d been, and we were getting closer to what I always privately thought of as my mother’s day. I started to have the recurring dream that plagues me at that time of year � every year since her death I’ve had it, without fail, and it builds in frequency and intensity until I wake up sweating, even screaming. (p. 228)
It’s an excellent story, highlighting how profoundly our childhood experiences can continue to haunt us, shaping our mindsets as we navigate adulthood.
In Something’s Coming, a married woman has persuaded her husband and their two young sons to come on a simple family holiday to Ireland, just like those she remembers from her youth. The trip is also a chance for the couple to reconnect, to have time to talk without juggling childcare and work commitments in the hubbub of London life.
As the story opens, the family are lost in the middle of nowhere, caught in inclement weather, their tempers fraying. At one point, the narrator is reminded of her deceased mother, whom she misses deeply, blurring the borders between motherhood and childhood, albeit momentarily.
‘Isn’t this an adventure,� I said brightly. I raised my voice above the noise of the car and the wind and the rain to say it, and the voice that came out wasn’t mine: it was my mum’s. For a vertiginous second she was me and I was a child again and it was impossible that I’d grown up, married, somehow had kids of my own � impossible that I ever would do so. The car seemed to stop moving. Everything seemed to stop as if none of it, this, was real. (p. 35)
As this very unsettling story unfolds, the narrator is haunted by creepy doll her sons picked up in a local shop, tapping into suppressed fears she tries to keep hidden�
In Cuddies, Caldwell explores motherhood from a somewhat different but equally interesting angle. In this piece, a married woman whose life is devoted to her three young daughters is persuaded by her husband to join a friend’s 40th birthday weekend, albeit rather reluctantly.
To read the rest of my review, please visit:
November 1, 2024
Openings is a fantastic collection of varied short stories from Lucy Caldwell and great to dip in and out of.
Some stories are evocatively written insights into the human condition, inspired by her own personal experiences, and all the more heartbreaking for that.
Other stories (and my personal favourites) are historical fiction, fantasy, or even paranormal/horror (maybe), such as the delightfully weird ‘the counting sheep�, the creepy ‘somethings coming� and the touching ‘daylight raids�.
She is a superb writer and I enjoyed this collection very much.
Be prepared for the frequent use of Irish phrases (none of which I understood lol). Whilst for the majority of them I could understand the meaning from the context, I found the number of them in ‘cuddies� a little off-putting, and it drew me out of what was otherwise a good story. Wouldn’t stop me re-reading any of them, though!
Some stories are evocatively written insights into the human condition, inspired by her own personal experiences, and all the more heartbreaking for that.
Other stories (and my personal favourites) are historical fiction, fantasy, or even paranormal/horror (maybe), such as the delightfully weird ‘the counting sheep�, the creepy ‘somethings coming� and the touching ‘daylight raids�.
She is a superb writer and I enjoyed this collection very much.
Be prepared for the frequent use of Irish phrases (none of which I understood lol). Whilst for the majority of them I could understand the meaning from the context, I found the number of them in ‘cuddies� a little off-putting, and it drew me out of what was otherwise a good story. Wouldn’t stop me re-reading any of them, though!
July 1, 2024
This started well but I did not enjoy it much which I am sad about.
Favorite story: Fiction
This was more like a realistic portrayal of something that could happen. It was mundane and familiar, just the type of story I like when it comes to short stories.
Favorite story: Fiction
This was more like a realistic portrayal of something that could happen. It was mundane and familiar, just the type of story I like when it comes to short stories.
July 2, 2024
Still firmly in my short story era, and this was a great collection that felt cohesive. Favourites were Fiction, Daylight Raids, and Bibi. Some stories didn’t land quite the same, but still, the writing was fantastic. Will definitely be picking up more of Caldwell’s work soon.
May 13, 2024
3.5 ⭐️
May 20, 2024
daylight raids 🥺💐
July 7, 2024
Beautiful writing 🔥
August 2, 2024
It’s sitting between a 3 and a 4, so 3.5?
August 6, 2024
What beautiful stories. Many deal with motherhood, in all it's varieties, a topic that can almost be taboo. A treasure.
October 4, 2024
A brilliant collection of beautifully written, awfully human stories.
October 21, 2024
13 short stories; all very subtle. The ones I liked the most were ‘Cuddies�, ‘Bibi�, and ‘Lay me down�. I had hoped I liked more of them.
October 28, 2024
Beautifully written stories and I do like the author’s style, but the topics, in general, seemed a bit mundane and the stories rather predictable with the same types of characters throughout.
January 13, 2025
3.8 stars
January 28, 2025
3.75/5
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