Pocket Money & Other Stories

(Paperback)

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Description

An academic and his wife are on holiday in Rome. He has a secret to reveal, but as he has yet to discover, so does his wife. A retired New Zealand businessman, lost in the middle of New Delhi, is dealing with crippling anxiety. A jilted bride takes her honeymoon alone, and finds peace through meeting a giant owl. Every story takes the reader on a journey as these richly painted characters solve mysteries, betray friends, battle bullies, all the while finding resilience and purpose in their lives. Spanning countries, cultures and characters, this delightful collection of stories is irreverent, surprising, and touching.

Reviews

Review by Adrienne Rewi, writer, Christchurch: This gathering of twenty stories written over a fifteen-year period, holds a microscope to the vagaries of Vivienne Lingards everyday characters to the challenges they face and the way they accommodate them. It is a clippings file if you will, of people observed and remembered, a series of vignettes that shines a light on the everyday struggles we all face, and in its entirety, it has a universality and familiarity that will strike at the hearts and minds of many. Shards of personal memory are entwined with the imagined to create a series of stories that speak to abandonment, grief, aging, manipulation, a childs heart-rending yearning for the approval of an emotionally unavailable mother and that perpetually disconcerting time we call approaching adolescence. The apparent ordinariness of characters belies the depth of their internal struggles and we are brought face-to-face with the complexity of families - an emotionally distant marriage, the unwitting sting of adult words, the confusion of growing old, the oddness of a collectors motivations and the recognition of our own limitations. We read about secrets, about half-lived lives, buried desires, hidden relatives and the potentially fraught nature of relationships. A good short story aims for the heart. It appeals to the senses. It keeps us guessing. It brings lives into sharp focus, and threads of a readers own life will often echo through the paragraphs. That is not an easy accomplishment. Having the commitment to produce a collection of stories that shine a light on human character is an accomplishment worth celebrating. Pocket Money & Other Stories is such a collection - a microcosm of everyday life, and the sting in the tail of so many of the stories is that they will resonate strongly with many readers. We will all find someone we know between the covers of this book - and like peas on a fork, there will be some lines, some stories that linger long after the reading is done.

Author Bio

Vivienne entered University at 50, first gaining a BEd (Massey University), followed by a Cambridge Certificate in ESOL (International House, Barcelona), a Masters in Creative Writing (University of Auckland), and a NZSA mentorship with Stephen Stratford. In 2016, she was accepted for a short story masterclass with Tom Jenks, author and editor, in San Francisco. She has facilitated critique groups for writers and has also been part of several writing groups over a fifteen-year period. Vivienne lives in Devonport Auckland.