Margaret Thompson - Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek
		Extract from Memento Mori ...There’d been a fall during the night, which had depressed everybody, thinking of that child alone in the cold. I imagine most of those men felt the same as I; there was little hope of finding her alive. We spread out in evenly spaced lines, advancing together as best we could through the bush, lurching and stumbling into concealed hollows, cursing the branches that slashed into our faces and snagged our clothes. At intervals we would shout her name; a ragged chorus of “Sky, Sky,” that set the ravens answering with their own harsh cries, but raised no other response. All day we tramped the still forest, stooping and prodding, the wet snow clinging to our leaden boots, the only sound the grunts of exertion or a muttered word and the name floating up like a lost balloon again and again.
	A collection of short stories that explore the ironies of human existence. Many of the characters are marginalized, living on the edge of things. Some hide essential parts of their natures or their experience, even from themselves; some are looking for explanation and understanding. What the critics say: “This is a fine collection, worthy of celebration. Thompson’s prose is clean, spare, sharp, providing us with a lucid portrait of the everyday constraints her characters inhabit. The strength of Thompson’s writing is its ability to embody that endless commentary in the mind that in some way defines personality…” Ross Leckie “It’s a rare moment when you read an unknown short story author and get the sense that you could be on to an important new literary figure…Her characters are so vital the pages almost have a pulse…She combines scene description and character development very cleverly and has penned – of all things – perhaps the best paragraph ever on how we all think of long and tedious bus rides.” Frank Peebles “What links all these (themes) is the sense, which does come through the book so strongly and effectively, that life has a lot of dangling ends to it, but our job is somehow to draw the strands together and give them meaning.” Ira Nadell
	ISBN: 0-920576-63-X Caitlin Press, 1996 www.caitlin-press.com Available from the author $8.50
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