The Accidentals
By Guadalupe Nettel
Translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey

Eight short stories with a common theme of displacement in some form another; a sliding door moment, an inadvertent betrayal, a brush with death, a story of being careful what you wish for, a story of watching someone else live the life you wanted for yourself, a dystopian imagining of living 15 years into a pandemic where lockdown is permanent.

At about 15 minutes for each story this collection could be gulped down in one go, but like all brilliant short stories, they each spark something in the imagination that makes them highly discussable. The writing style invites the reader straight in and with the exception of one, I found myself brooding over them and chatting about their premises with anyone who would listen.

My personal favourite is Life Elsewhere, but that is purely down to that whiffle we get when we encounter a familiar and loved location in our reading, in this case Gràcia in Barcelona.

I couldn't recommend this collection enough, a perfect combination of thematically contemporary and technically classical short stories that I could imagine George Saunders giving a big "Russian Greats" thumps up to.

Thanks to #NetGalley and #fitzcarraldoeditions for the ARC

The Accidentals is a collection of short stories by award winning novelist, Guadalupe Nettel. This collection deals with people coping with isolation, estrangement and the unknown.

My favourites were the title story about a boy and a girl who are the closest of friends but end up living in different countries; Torpor which imagines a family's life in a world coping with a virus for which there is no vaccine; Pink Door which tells the story of a man enticed into changing his life simply by eating a piece of confectionery. I think Pink Door edged it with the favouritism because it seemed so plausible - we are dissatisfied, we want a change but are we ever prepared for the outcome of change.

The writing is superb and I found myself wanting to rush through these stories and had to force myself to slow down. They are well worth savouring.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo for the advance review copy. Most appreciated.

The short stories in this collection have a compelling narrative voice, as if confiding in the reader. I liked the way they felt grounded in everyday life even as elements of the uncanny and paranormal were introduced.

My favourite passage was about a family's fraught game of Scrabble: "The first word he put down was JOKER, then he waited a couple of turns and added BASTARD, then BULLY, putting his tiles down on a part of the board which gave him a triple word score. At first we didn't notice, but then it started to come clear that these insults were aimed at his father."

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance copy.

One of the more inventive and touching short story collections I read in a while. Each story is characterised by an accident, or an occurence, that changes the typical flow of events. The stories are all told in the first person, but in all of them that first person is a very different character.

They are (nearly) all great, but the most memorable is perhaps the story of the man in his 60s looking to find new excitement in his life, but stumbles upon a way to do this that goes above and beyond his expectations. The story of the family trying to spend some time in nature, whose experience is turned on its head due to a bushfire is also exemplary in its analysis of a family struggling to stay together as its teenage sons turn into men. The story of the ageing actor, who regrets not getting the rental flat in Barcelona he yearned for is heartbreaking. The weakest story is, in my view, the last - describing a hypothetical reality where the lockdowns due to Covid never ended. I found that to be the least emotionally profound.

I loved the way each story was able to represent a completely fresh and different perspective on events, despite all being written by the same author. It almost felt like different people were writing these stories, and it was absolutely fantastic - I was enthralled by each narrator's emotional state, and felt immersed in their subjective reality.

It's an excellent read, and I recommend it to anyone interested in how unexpected events can affect lives in unexpected, but often small, ways. The fragility of life, plans, and intentions is paramount here.

My huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

this is my second Guadalupe Nettel ever and of the year and I can safely say I have found one of my new favourite authors. Beautifully written

After her [book:Still Born|59115451], Nettel has been firmly on my radar and this collection of stories has sealed the deal. These tales are often suggestive rather than clearly defined and completed but that adds effectively to the sense of uneasy contingencies that they articulate.

Without tipping cleanly into defined genre categories like horror, suspense or fantasy, these stories play around the edges of all of these and boundary-cross in a free and creative way. They deal with disruptions: moments when something changes, when the past comes into clear view, when the present becomes untenable, when perceptions veer off in uncanny directions and when life gets shunted off its path. There may be a dark humour ('The Pink Door') but also tales where what is admitted on the surface isn't nearly as disturbing as what isn't expressed by the narrator (the brilliant 'Playing With Fire', for example).

With involving writing and some stop-and-read-it-again imagery, Nettel's work here is literarily sophisticated while appearing accessible and open. This is a good companion to the realist mode of [book:Still Born|59115451], showcasing a different side of Nettel's writing which appears to draw on wider Latin American models.

Unusually for a collection, there isn't a single 'dud' story here: every one in this volume earns its place and offers different trajectories around a theme of disturbance, disruptions and disjunctions.

This is a beautifully curated collection, with each story being distinct and specific, but tied together by a sense of displacement, of the protagonist being out of step with their surroundings, their loved ones, their community, even their time. They are short yet satisfying: minutely detailed glimpses of an experience, each one of which I could have stayed in far longer.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Typically impressive collection of seven short stories by Guadalupe Nettel from Fitzcarraldo. A short volume, the stories pivot around issues of family dysfunction and disruption against a sometimes unsettling backdrop of the natural world (Playing with Fire, A Forest Under the Earth) or uncanny playfulness (The Pink Door, The Torpor). All of the stories create a world and end satisfyingly, while leaving you wanting more, which is what a good short story should do. There is also a longing here, for home and childhood, that the title story captures most clearly. An excellent collection.

Precise, wonderfully put together. Enough of a substance for each story, enough left for the reader to walk off and wonder and draw their own conclusions. One or two stories have really stayed with me, and I'll be returning to this collection again in the future

Such a great anthology of stories to get lost in! I love that if you’re not up for reading a full story you can dip in and out of this great compilation of stories about the human experience