In this podcast I am going to read “Smoking in the Park”, a short story included in my new collection, “An Irregular Piece of Sky”, which should be published later this year.
In common with much of my fiction, the story concerns someone forced not only to look back on their past, but who is then challenged to confront it contemporaneously in a very real way. I have attempted to show how much uncertainty there is in attempting to reevaluate our histories, and to decide what something meant, or was worth. This uncertainty is multiplied many times over when the past we are confronting is emotional rather than factual…