Ian Gouge – författare

Pebbles on the Strand is an international collection of contemporary short stories which follows on from our 2022 volume, Making Marks in the Sand.

The stories in this collection explore a vast range of human emotion and experience: humour, loss, grief, alienation, revenge, exploration, drama, and myth.

No two stories are alike. A veritable Cornucopia for readers.

"Books talk to the inner person, the secret person; they can make direct contact with all those subterranean feelings and desires you speak of."

Vincent edits books. It is modest and quiet occupation - yet one which is about to be thrown into turmoil thanks to the arrival of woman, her gift to him, and the words of his old mentor: "it''s not what we keep out of a book that counts, but what we might put in."

Orwell meets Kafka in this tale of a dystopian future which could be a lot closer than we might realise...

A house filled with history and secrets is more than mere bricks and mortar; not only a mirror on the past, it can also be a window to the future.

"masterful..soul-searching. I would have liked to live next door to Owen and Maddie; I feel we would have been friends" - Siobhan Gifford

"a dextrously woven story of how the complexities of any given life remain with us, and remain too within the bricks and mortar that bore witness" - Jonty Pennington-Twist

"a beautifully crafted story" - Janet Burl

Take four strangers arriving in London on the same train one weekday morning, then follow them as their various endeavours sees them criss-cross the capital before they take on the same service north later in the day.

Will the injured sportsman be given a clean bill of health - or will he leave the capital more uncertain of his future than ever?

Will the ambitious PA be successful in her interview - or find she is unable to free herself from the shackles of her past life?

Will the repentant brother be rewarded with the forgiveness of his siblings or a longed for reacquaintance with God?

Will the egotistical playwright rise above the disappointment of a commercial ''flop'' to reaffirm his course to self-anointed greatness?

Or will the City - and Life - beat them all down, four characters struggling to defeat the insistent demands of living?

Whenever I pull together an anthology such as this, I am inevitably struck by the quality and variety of both the fiction and poetry being written today. Curating an anthology such as this is therefore both a joy and a challenge; after all, it is not easy to distil a couple of hundred pieces down into a manageable number to form a collection (in the present case, seventy-four pieces).

However, for this edition of New Contexts I was struck more than ever by the notion that the contributors had important things to say - and about significant topics too: war, disease, aging, love, refugees, our place in the world. These are all 'big' topics of course, and as such hardly novel; writers have been devoting their talents to addressing them for hundreds of years. Yet it struck me that many of the submissions for this book attempted to tackle their themes with a common sense of urgency.

Perhaps this is a reflection of our times; or perhaps it was merely my interpretation of them. Whichever is true, I am confident that New Contexts: 5 represents another meritorious addition to our canon.

An Irregular Piece of Sky contains fifteen contemporary stories in which we meet characters trying to come to terms with loss and grief, the potential of love, their histories and the opportunities the future may offer them. 

Ian Gouge introduces us to people who - just like us - are striving to make sense of their place in the world.

A group of five friends who, some thirty years after they lived and worked in the same town, come back together to honour an old friend who has recently died. The weekend is intended as a celebration but merely serves to reignite old emotions and uncover long-held secrets.

"Sally Rooney meets Henry James" - Jim Friedman

"this honest exploration of human nature helped me understand myself better" - Ann Pelletier-Topping

"a story that questions the whole idea of friendship and the notion that we can ever really know anyone" - Janet Philo

"a deeply engaging book...every moment of dialogue and recollection is thoroughly believable" - David Punter