Neil Bowen

People are Strange: Short Stories Neil Bowen

When he gets home from visiting his new best friend, a young boy finds a letter mysteriously tucked into the pocket of his coat. The letter is his first encounter with romantic love. And, perhaps, his last. The notes a middle-aged teacher receives out-of-the -blue are brutally to-the-point and increasingly threatening. Meanwhile a young girl faces a false accusation and learns something bitter about class and power, while a boy not much older than her travels North by train to meet the mother he'd always been told was dead. Years later, a wife hits on an innovative money-making idea while an anxious newly qualified teacher struggles to find any ideas at all as to how to teach 'Macbeth' to a difficult class and an older colleague puzzles about what to do with a boy who demands to attach a tail to his school uniform. Years earlier an auxiliary policeman travels by motorbike to arrest a German pilot captured after crashing in a Welsh farmer's field.

This debut collection features a host of characters trapped somehow in their lives. When some kind of opportunity for liberation opens up they have choices to make, choices on which a whole life balances. There are comic, satirical stories drawn from a career in teaching and tender stories of family life and about growing up. Some stories are presented in conventional forms, while others bend and stretch the short story or pare it down to only the absolute essentials.