Description
Cover Art: Vox Hybrida 3 by Alice Maher
Cover Design: Rory Jeffers
Meet Mrs Dallesandro, luxuriating in a Belfast tanning salon on her wedding anniversary, dreaming of a teenage sexual encounter. Or Max, recalling an eventful car journey to a Christian film festival. Meet Drew Lord Haig, hired to perform an obscure song from his youth at a paramilitary group’s centenary celebrations. And Sonya, who is desperately scouring the city’s streets for the missing posters of her lost son.
In Dance Move, Wendy Erskine’s brilliant new collection of short stories, we meet characters who are looking to wrest control of their lives, only to find themselves defined by moments in their past that have marked them.
In these stories – as in real life – the funny, the tender and the devastating go hand in hand. Full of warmth, the familiar and the strange, they are about what it means to live in the world, how far we can end up from where we came from, and what it means to look back.
‘I found Dance Move to be a profound, moving and brilliant collection of short stories.’—Adrian Duncan
‘Wendy Erskine writes a damn good story. She accomplishes something rare in having a style so distinctive that, just a few sentences in, each story is unmistakably hers… all the while appearing to be very light on style. There’s an ease that conveys so much enjoyment to the reader: we are permitted in without ID checks; we’re invited to take part in questionable dance moves… and cancellably sexy ones. And there’s that bone-dry, characteristic humour borne of a sensibility and place and culture that’s idiosyncratic as all good, vibrant, storied things.’—Caoilinn Hughes
‘Wendy Erskine is the greatest short story writer of her generation. Dance Move is a masterpiece.’—David Keenan
‘Who but Wendy Erskine could sift the circumstantial heroism from such wonky, off-track lives. These extraordinary stories land with real weight but ever so softly.’—Rónán Hession
‘There are few short story writers I look forward to reading as much as Wendy Erskine. Humane, funny, surprising, profound; in Dance Move she does it all.’—Chris Power
‘Dance Move is a triumph, each story so perfectly formed, each character vividly set and startling. I could not put this book down and loved every page. Wendy Erskine is a profound and ingenious story teller, a magnificent writer of the highest calibre.’—Salena Godden
‘The people that inhabit Wendy Erskine’s stories are not merely “characters”, but instead are living, breathing entities whose lives, you feel, continue beyond the page. Few writers achieve this depth of human understanding so succinctly, and to read Dance Move is to step into their shadowed worlds. It also cements her status as simply one of the very best short story writers around.’—Benjamin Myers
