Something like happy is definitely not how you will feel after reading this collection of John Burnside’s most recent short stories. Emotionally worn, yes. Contemplative, yes. Happy ..? The search for happiness within this book is something of a myth; ‘there’s something contrived about the happy moments’, the sombre and looming thoughts of the varying narrators casting light on the way we define happiness. What is it to be happy? Is it simply a warm cup of tea, a hug, a smile? How do we measure the emotions we have? The scenes produced are masked in shadow, in snow, sleet, sludge. The weather is deceptive, hiding, like the characters themselves, blurred.

In an interview for the Guardian, Burnside credited his inspiration to the work of the artist Breugel and this becomes a good analogy for this collection and what the stories depict. An array of colours and characters lumped together, their tales slip seamlessly out of each other, both entirely isolated and at the same time inextricably interwoven. A repeated image of a mouse or the recurring violence of knife crime jabbing into different tales becomes something of an odd repercussion that is almost unwelcome; it is too simple, too quick, and too blunt for the intricacy of the stories that precede it. But it is partly this unapologetic contrast that makes Burnside’s prose so magnetic, this sense that you really don’t know what’s going to happen next. Watching them pan out feels like peeping into a stranger’s window late at night, or rummaging through someone’s drawers: intimate and uncomfortable.

Yet despite this overwrought attention to character the majority of Burnside’s tales seem to, like their characters, be fading away. All the tales deal on some level with vanishing (the word occurs several times within each tale) constantly ripping apart and forcing together different people: the emotional vanishings of love in a relationship, the desire to not be seen, to disappear, but the simultaneous desire to feel, to touch, to be heard. The collection is full of vanishing people, characters that seem to shift before our eyes melding into one another, images drifting from story to story, echoing and interrupting. Yet Burnside’s characters linger with you, their vanishing and reappearing becomes an intricate web of emotions, of loves of hates, or more than often simple mundane existence, something that disturbs more than violence. A girl who ‘spends most of her life as a shadow of her real and inevitably mysterious self’, who is ‘like a well-tended garden a little too tidy, a little too well managed’, or simply people whose, ‘secret selves (are) discarded for their return to the outside world.’

Every sentence, every semi-colon seems perfectly placed: the sentences sing. It feels good to read. The words are sumptuous, the images crisp, unnervingly poignant: real. Each scene brings with it clashes of colour, taste: the comforting reminder of peach ice cream, or the bitter richness of port. ‘Why does one moment have so much power?’, Burnside muses, I don’t know, but these stories are powerful. I urge you to read them.