Your Father Sends His Love

October 26, 2015
Evers’s latest is a collection of 12 stories centered on family. In “Lakelands,” the young victim of a hate crime copes with the imprisonment of his father, who has attacked the perpetrators of the crime. In “Wings,” a woman tries to conceal from her family a tattoo that she has gotten in memory of her sister. Doing things for family—out of love or fear—is a theme that runs through these stories, with particular success in “Live from the Palladium,” about a single mother trying to push her flailing son into the unforgiving world of stand-up comedy, the same profession his deceased father once had. “Swarm,” a futuristic story about the darker side of live-streaming, is inventive. The dialogue throughout the collection is a bit flat and formal, and sometimes characters can barely be distinguished from one another: the grandfather in “These Are the Days,” for instance, sounds like a mournful composite of elderly characters we’ve met before and sounds especially similar to the father in “Lakelands.” There are nice, memorable moments in these stories, but like the characters, they begin to run together. Agent: Lucy Luck, Aitken Alexander Associates.

November 1, 2015
These short stories explore varieties of family strife and warmth in a style with roots in Raymond Carver but more humor, sympathy, and sinew. In the opening story, "Lakelands," a man recalls revealing his homosexuality when he was a teen to his laborer father and lying about why he was beaten up by a group of youths. The interplay of guilt, understanding, hope, and violence reveals that this British writer (If This Is Home, 2012, etc.) has many colors and layers on his canvas. "Frequencies" begins with a catalog of observations that signal a father's anxiety over the infant he's minding while his wife travels for work, the boy who came after years of failed efforts to conceive. When he hears a voice speaking in the baby monitor about raising children, the percolating anxiety turns tangible, eerie, and recalls John Cheever's "Enormous Radio." Most Carver-esque and more charming than effective is "What's Going on Outside," in which two men on some kind of surveillance discuss how one peels and eats oranges, among a very few subjects. Evers is generally good with simple relationships: the retired man and granddaughter of "These Are the Days"; the mother who encourages her son to do stand-up comedy in "Live from the Palladium." The title story also touches on the entertainment world, as a TV personality dwells in a past that includes one handicapped son and one estranged one. It's an ambitious piece that shifts between London and Thailand and comes, with heavy irony, to focus on notebooks containing years of jokes that the father considers "his true legacy." This is an uneven gathering but free of duds, and Evers often achieves the special pleasure of short stories, infusing small worlds with more life than seems possible.

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November 15, 2015
In British author Evers' American debut, the lonely, disheartened, and displaced struggle with fragile family relationships. In one story, a mother secretly gets wings tattooed on her back to honor the short life of her reckless sister and feels a surge of confidence. Fathers loom largest throughout the collection, even when absent from the central conflict. A teenager and his mother, elegant but adrift in the wake of her husband's untimely death, basically communicate in punch lines until they recognize their unease. A gay man recalls his coming out and how his father paid the consequence. A retiree lets his granddaughter live with him, refusing to ask why she is hiding. A new father reflects on parenthood and marriage when the baby monitor intercepts a strange monologue. A drug addict tries to decode his father, an egotistical game-show host. At once tender and stylish, Evers' taut prose reinforces his characters' strained attempts to connect in short stories that cast razor-sharp beams of light into the darkest corners of family life, illuminating both the pain and joy of love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)