Summary: a wonderful collection of short stories of contemporary Belfast

The first recorded ventriloquists in history were the Oracle at Delphi. These priestesses, who divined the future for fearful supplicants that sought their counsel, would take on the voices of the dead, and the gods, to add gravitas to their prophesies.

I was put in mind of these sorceresses reading Wendy Erskine’s wonderful collection of short stories, Sweet Home, because Erskine displays a similar witchcraft in the way in which she so convincingly evokes the diverse lives, and the diverse voices of the inhabitants of her stories. 

Like the blasted heath on which Macbeth encounters his witches, the contemporary Belfast in which these stories are set bears the scars of war and the gangsterism that flourished in the margins of that conflict. 

And yet even the most unpleasant of her wholly believable characters are treated with an extraordinary empathy by Erskine. With the brilliance of her writing, she forces the reader to understand that even the extortionist, or the disagreeable schoolteacher, whose stories she tells are still human beings with their own hopes, their own tragedies which have shaped who they have become. 

There may be few unambiguous happy endings in these stories. But they are filled with tenderness, lashings of pitch-black Belfast humour, and enough optimism to hope that some of these characters may yet see better days, even if that is only the quiet needed to read, the friendship of a new neighbour, or the chance of promotion for a shop worker. 

In a world of tawdry illusions and cheap tricksterism, Erskine’s stories are the real deal: the rarest of enchantments that the Irish call great short stories, and the rest of the world calls enduring literature. 

Magic.