Five Tuesdays in winter : stories /

These 10 stories from King (Writers & Lovers, 2020), half of which have never before been published, subtly explore love and grief, disappointment and triumph. A 14-year-old summer nanny pines naively for her charges' uncle, but her instincts are well honed when they need to be. A much-saved-for vacation on the North Sea is a near failure for a German widow and her implacable young daughter. In the lovely title story, a prickly bookseller falls in love with his employee and has trouble voicing his feelings: "Questions swarmed but stayed behind the tight knot in his throat." Readers will imagine that a novel could be spun from the story of a woman who, after a bad breakup, moves in with her brother and his fiancée; the fiancée, in turn, will not entertain the siblings' penchant for literary discussion. A significant part of these memorable, re-readable stories' charm is that King gifts them with so much keen dialogue, truthful interiority, and fine backstory--the stuff of real life. An absolute must for King's fans, this would also be great for book groups.

National Book Critics Circle award winner King (Euphoria) delivers a rich and varied collection filled with characters whose lives are transformed by old and new acquaintances, addiction, and the written word. In the opener, "Creature," teenage narrator Carol finds summer employment as a nanny while she reads Jane Eyre, a novel that has strange and fascinating resonances for her. In "When in the Dordogne," the narrator, a "martini baby, conceived after one too many in late July 1971," struggles in the wake of his father's failed suicide. "The Man at the Door," the collection's finest entry, finds a writer who's also a mother experiencing the heaven of her avocation--"This morning, however, a sentence rose, a strange unexpected chain of words meeting the surface in one long gorgeous arc"--before being quickly brought back down to earth: "The baby bleated through the monitor. She'd only managed to get three sentences on the page." These stories crackle and shine, and King is a master of the thumbnail portrait: she can create a fully realized life in a single paragraph and then alter it in breathtaking ways. This is a must for fans of the short story. Agent: Julie Barer, the Barer Group. (Nov.)

In "Creature," the opening story in King's (Writers & Lovers) dazzling new collection, 14-year-old Carol spends the summer nannying for a wealthy family in her New England beach town and becomes infatuated with the children's charming, insouciant young uncle. Like many characters in this collection, Carol has an alcohol-addicted parent and an unhappy home life. On the cusp of adulthood, trying out new identities, Carol is a stranger to herself, inhabiting an unfamiliar body. Similarly, "When in the Dordogne" features a lonely adolescent protagonist from a troubled family. He's been left at home by his inattentive parents in the care of two kind local college boys during a summer that becomes pivotal to his understanding of the world. Though the protagonists range from a young girl to a middle-aged gay man to a gruff nonagenarian grandfather, the stories share certain characteristics; King is a master at conveying through subtle description the small, painful, bumbling moments of life and the awkwardness of human interactions. In the title story, a touching and quiet tale of hope and connection, a repressed bookseller, the single parent to a gregarious 12-year-old daughter, falls in love with his employee. VERDICT A series of beautifully written character studies brimming with insight into the human condition.--Lauren Gilbert, Ctr. for Jewish History, New York

The first collection of stories from an acclaimed novelist. King, who won the inaugural Kirkus Prize for Fiction for Euphoria (2014), can make you fall in love with a character fast, especially the smart, vulnerable, often painfully self-conscious adolescent protagonists featured in several of the 10 stories collected here, half previously published, half new. In "Creature," the fetching opener, 14-year-old Carol is hired to be a live-in mother's helper by a rich woman whose children and grandchildren are coming for a two-week visit, a woman so entitled she breezily renames her Cara because she likes it better. Under the influence of Jane Eyre, Carol is swept away by the charms of the woman's newly married son, who's arrived without his wife. "You cannot know these blistering feelings," she writes to her friend, "you have not yet met your Rochester." As in King's debut, Father of the Rain (2010), alcoholism and mental illness shadow many characters' lives. Carol has a father in rehab, while the unnamed boy narrator of "When in the Dordogne" has parents who have left for France following the father's nervous breakdown and failed suicide attempt. His babysitters are a pair of college boys with whom he has so much more fun than usual that he dreams that his parents will get in a car crash and never return. The protagonists of other stories show King's range, among them a gay man who receives a surprise visit from his homophobic college roommate, a Frenchwoman living in the U.S. whose husband has abruptly moved on, a German woman taking her bratty daughter on holiday to an unpromising inn on the North Sea, a 91-year-old visiting his young granddaughter in the hospital. The final story, "The Man at the Door," about frustrations of the writing process, also tells of its joys: "This morning, however, without warning, a sentence rose, a strange unexpected chain of words meeting the surface in one long gorgeous arc....Words flooded her and her hand ached to keep up with them and above it all her mind was singing here it is here it is and she was smiling." Full of insights and pleasures. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.