THE SEA BY CAMBRIDGE WRITERS short story competition
Newly launched collection of short stories by Cambridge Writers ‘The Sea’
Nikolai Gogol wrote the world’s best short story, some say, The Overcoat. He captures the anguish and anxiety of one man in a single day. In his wake comes the maître of short story magic, Guy de Maupassant made Boule de Suif, survive to re-emerge as a John Wayne movie - Stagecoach. Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party ranks among the stars of short storytelling as do many of the miniature works of genius penned by D.H. Lawrence. – Daughters of the Vicar is the most heart-warming tale in all his oeuvre.
This volume contains a range of short stories to shock, alarm and so often delight.
I should know I have read them all carefully. And then read them again as the Judge of the renowned Cambridge Writers’ Competition. The theme is The Sea and any reader will soon realize how strangely different is each tale as it takes the theme to diverse places.
Readers of this anthology will be in for a roller coaster of a ride. I have to confess my trip through this rich landscape of inventive talent was a surprise. Every single story made perfect sense in its own world - some are coded for hidden meaning, others bright and simple, every one is worth attention
Sea Change launches us out to the wide ocean with a dramatic burial, a body catapulted into the waves. We switch to a special voyage with a cynical narrator who has already begun to regret the ‘trip of a lifetime’. The presence of a child who visits every day is at first irksome, but warms to a fondness despite his mysterious background.
Baltic begins with a claustrophobic crew onboard a yacht docked somewhere in Scandiwegia. Sexual tension builds as a bully boy stranger threatens the fragile amateurish sailors. Each member has its own motivation – the sassy narrator makes her future plans – with one of them.
The Love of French Blue is a tender memoir of a young lad’s love affair with the Riviera. Not the rich men’s paradise but a world far from his cool cloudy homeland, where he can fall in love as youngsters do, with the place. In the background lurks the shadow of anger and dissent as his parents begin to split but the brilliant writing here leaves any reader with a nostalgia for those early teens when anything seemed possible.
In Where Rivers Go we return to a childhood scarred by want and poverty but warmed by love and imagination. Here is a stand-alone lament for just a little more liberty and much less anxiety. It is beautifully detailed.
Seaside Shenanigans and Mundesley Beach share the same stretch of coastline for their stories. Both handle the worlds of childhood next to the spheres of adult sexuality.
Both are brilliantly worked and carefully plotted. Similar settings but such strangely different outcomes. Characters as children leap into sensitive life, as both plots, intricately managed, make for two moving conclusions. The adult world and the memories from children make for rich backgrounds of satisfying storytelling.
A Second Chance allows its narrator to remedy past sin and redeem themselves in another world. Bitterness and an invasive misanthropy suffuse the narrator’s seaside life over the years. The story’s climax is revelatory, and we readers learn how far from reality this storyteller has strayed. From beyond the grave there is resolution.
Plenty of Fish, the diary of a cynical online dater is a great fun read. Our narrator gives us a Jilly Cooper style romp through her attempts to land a man in the sea of disappointing fish. A story to cheer the spirits it bounces along at a hilarious pace – into the future for its disillusioned narrator.
Painting Blue by Julia Ball
The Traveller is a cunningly contrived story of survival. This is a must-read. The narrator here is clearly a refugee ready for a daunting sea trip “I walk into the water to accustom myself to the feel of the waves on my legs,” The story oozes menace and danger, the protagonist utterly convincing. The Traveller takes us close as any writer surely can to the reality of the world of the refugee. Sceptical and manipulative is what this traveller must be – but when her chance comes, she seizes it. Convincing and original.
Skinned Alive is a confident foray into the world of mismatched friends and disapproving neighbours. Its sense of the sea and its joyous rendition of fun on the beach create a bright atmosphere. Clever manipulation of character – and plot help it into the realm of fun.
The Sea is All Wrong makes an unusual story heart-warming with its delightful little protagonist and his artist mother. Needs careful read but a delight to find a tricky resolution, find out the connection with Picasso for a capricious ending.
Whale Grave tackles homelessness at the seaside, a coming-of-age revenge, all with a slick of heroism. Coastal erosion is seldom tackled in fiction but this tender and careful tale around a sensitive young boy and his bitterness makes for an unsettling but excellent read.
Lorraine Botpol The Dive
The challenge of reading De Parfouru’s Cat will puzzle and delight you for days, indeed forever if the recondite mystery of its author has his way. The most unusual of stories, it is meticulously written in its own era, nineteenth century Paris, but promises an eternal dimension. Intriguing it is and very worthwhile.
The Leap is a story of adventure and friendship. Prompted by happenstance in an intimate Welsh pub, the narrator takes us through the life of a long-gone friend. John’s spirit inhabits the narrator’s memory in a mixture of admiration and regret. We thread through his life as a seafarer, philanderer, self-taught scholar and someone with a daring quest for love. The leap of the title is an act of daring, a commitment to life John only realises at the end of his life. Or has it been imagined by the narrator? Here is a compelling story. The background from Rio to South Wales is wonderfully rendered. One to turn down a page for and devour in one session.
Growing Pains is a letter home. But the seemingly sensitive son has some unusual news. Its narration goes from dark to shocking but his insouciant delivery hints at a psychopath rather than a lad away at sea. Hinged on the long-ago crochet his grandmother completed, this story haunts and horrifies – but always has control of its malevolent theme.
Seal-skinned Stranger certainly takes the senses on a bleak desperate turn of cold chill sea events. Mystery surrounds the missing Sophie as her mother dreads the outcome of her nine-year old’s sudden disappearance. Guilt shame and sin haunt this story The final words ‘She didn’t know him’ come too late.
Jane Cradock Watson-Treasures-collograph
Naïve Maddy is the centrepiece of ‘Red Snapper’. In her late thirties and happy with her contented husband Frank, she revels in her trips to the market. Which is where the allure of Red the new virile fishmonger takes hold. What follows is almost an adventure too far. A story full of colour and sensuous sense of the sea holds dangers unforeseen. This writer has a reader’s full attention to the last.
Erosion begins as a breezy narrative of two artists who find their dream cliff top home at risk. Decades of dedication to the village community count for nothing when the cottage they had loved is under threat of abandonment. Carefully crafted we begin to understand the thwarted narrator – and why he makes the dramatic decisions he does.
The Lure has us join a bright Thelma and Louise style pair of adventurous women d’un certain age, Jill and Rosemary as they take to the open coastal road. Their earthy gossip so believably sustained, centres around watching old Top of the Pops from Rosemary’s capacious sofa where she lolls like a ‘beached whale’ Full of humour - Rosemary puts on weight from comfort eating, worsened by her loss of faith when they appointed a gay vicar.’ But the story has a darker sadder side. Compulsive reading to the last.
Ecstasy: Solace is a dangerous foray from its beginning on a wild Oriental destination surrounded by hippy drug takers and a motley collection of hangers-on. But it is the trip to Yek Ta Si a magical island reached with a wild ferryman which takes this searcher /author after spiritual truth to somewhere quite other. A surprise of a story with hidden danger.
The Message of Freedom describes the narrative of a young woman who receives dozens of intriguing post cards from Sydney. Homesick in many ways, she finds the ocean link with her family and the future she hopes for. A simple narration spiked by unexpected details.
The Wave is a miniature thriller. Self-centred and self-serving this narrator takes risks in his life. The theatre and the world of performance suffuse his life. In a few short pages we enter a new world of desperation and flamboyance. It leads to a grim dénouement full of disillusion as the hero of the story meets painful reality
Good reading!
The easiest way to buy The Sea is online. It is a non-profit venture https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1913410218/
