All the Beloved Ghosts

February 20, 2017
MacLeod’s (Unexploded) collection of stories deftly blends fiction and facts, memory and biography, to delve into the precarious nature of human life. The ghosts here are not literal—except, perhaps, in the mind of one elderly character from the title story and one brief appearance by the late Sylvia Plath. Instead, the visitations of supernatural and fantastic beings in MacLeod’s hands are suggestive of haunting memories and the traces that harrowing experiences leave behind. In “The Thaw,” a girl attends a town dance and on that night of horrific tragedy, has the time of her life. In “The Heart of Denis Noble” a cardiovascular surgeon prepping for heart surgery has flashbacks to his younger days, his first breakthrough research on heart conditions, and the hard lessons he has learned about the vagaries of love. In “There Are Precious Things” the lives of people traveling in a subway car—a single mother worried about her job, a nun on leave to get a hearing aid, a man with Alzheimer’s, among others—are examined. In “Dreaming Diana: Twelve Frames,” the short life and widely controversial death of Princess Diana are revisited by a fan. Finely layered and often teasingly opaque, MacLeod’s captivating book of stories presents a diverse array of voices, each as particular as the last.

Starred review from February 15, 2017
MacLeod, who was born in Montreal and lives in Britain, merges fact and fiction in her new collection of short stories, her first book to be published in the U.S. since her debut novel, The Changeling (1996).Wide-ranging and haunting, this collection seamlessly blends memoir, biography, and imagination to create narratives that explore the edges of reality and the ghosts that exist there. Death looms large, either as a threat or a perspective through which the characters view the nature of time. The opening story, "The Thaw," outlines the final day of a young Canadian woman's life and the legacy of grief she becomes part of when she dies unexpectedly. In "Sylvia Wears Pink in the Underworld" and "Dreaming Diana: Twelve Frames," the losses of celebrities are examined through the lens of the author's own connection to Sylvia Plath and Princess Diana, two women turned into public spectacles and pop-culture icons. The title story, about Angelica Garnett, and "Oscillate Wildly" are moving looks back at lives near their end, while "The Heart of Denis Noble" melds science and passion as a man receives a new heart. Two of the collection's standout stories are "There are precious things" and "In Praise of Radical Fish." The former is a character study of the passengers on an Underground train, all of whom connect and react to one another over the course of a brief ride that highlights the humanity in a crowd. The latter is a funny and tense look at three would-be jihadis on a day at Brighton, where their fears and doubts about an upcoming mission come to the surface. All these stories are written in striking prose that seamlessly blends the real with the fictive, tapping into the unknown with compassion and genuine human emotion. A uniquely cohesive collection of short examinations of aging, death, and living, these stories are subtly moving and thoroughly engaging.

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Starred review from March 1, 2017
A problem can occur in a reader's consciousness while proceeding through a collection of stories by the same author. Given that all the stories spring from the same sensibilities, style, and practiced subject matter, a sense of sameness can arise; not really a feeling of redundancy but one of a familiarity that may or may not feel comfortable, depending on the reader's sensitivity to repetition. No reader needs to worry about Booker long-lister MacLeod's (Unexploded, 2013) brilliant gathering of short fiction. Two examples demonstrate its rich variety. The Thaw is somewhat unusual for short fiction in that it is set in the past1926, to be exact. And how artfully MacLeod establishes that fact by referring to one character's new 1926 Buick Roadster as she tells a stunning family story that has become a local legend as an indication of the past's more rigid social mores. In Praise of Radical Fish offers a topical situation involving young men in England gathering for a pre-jihad team-building weekend. A thread of humor slyly works its way through this pointed tale, not for the purpose of mockery or spoof but rather to underscore that many serious engagements in life have an element of farce.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)