As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading OUR SHARED SHELF IS CURRENTLY DORMANT AND NOT MANAGED BY EMMA AND HER TEAM.

Daisy Johnson (born 1990) is a British novelist and short story writer. [1] Her debut novel, Everything Under, was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, [2] and beside Eleanor Catton is the youngest nominee in the prize's history. For her short stories, she has won three awards since 2014. Nevertheless, she embarks on an improbable relationship, which is unexpectedly cut short and even more unexpectedly transformed. Als er plaats is in je hoofd en de schrijver schrijft goed, dan kan er veel gebeuren. Je begint bij de eerste alinea, en je zult het zien: wat zich op de eerste pagina aandient, neem je na een paar bladzijden aan als waar. Een gezin verhuist, een grootmoeder sterft, een liefde gaat uit.She stops, waits, nods. The male-dominated stories we have told ourselves are missing such a large part of human experience that there needs to be space for alternative ones next to them, she explains, a space opened up by the irruption of the uncanny. “It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be writing about male characters, but women need to appear not only as mothers and partners, they need to appear as I-carrying figures in their own right.” It’s a project she first explains as being inspired by the authors she was reading and studying when she started working on the collection in 2014, writers such as Sarah Hall, Kelly Link, Karen Russell and Mary Gaitskill. “A lot of short-story writers are … creating stories that otherwise might be realistic, but have this seed of change in the middle,” Johnson says, citing Hall’s award-winning story Mrs Fox, in which a woman changes into a vixen during a woodland walk: “The transformation destroys the reality around it.”

The tales are populated by albatrosses, foxes and cats who seem to know more than they ought to, and the result is a creepy but beautiful debut book from an exceptionally talented young English author.The family lived in “amazing, strange rental houses - old chapels and gamekeeper’s cottages,” she said. They moved around every couple of years, living in Ely and Chippenham, shopping in Fordham, while Ms Johnson went to school in Little Thetford. It’s not hard to imagine the flat, foreboding landscape of the Fens outside this circle, and the creeping water. The distinctiveness of this collection is set from the first story – what at first seems to be a tale of teenage anorexia turns into a story of land drainage and transformation into an eel – and is followed by a story of men-eating women who are then possessed by the men they eat and then by a jealous house, and later by a new mother who experiences the visitation of a sailor’s superstition, and by a woman fashioned from the Fen earth and magical belief.