Hitting Trees with Sticks

A young textile designer quits Britain to work for a Nigerian women s refuge, confident that this is her one chance to make a difference... A sixteen-year-old uses his first job, as a window-cleaner, to peer into other people s lives and carefully plan his own... A leading scientist spends an evening trying to explain his latest theory to a man who could destroy him... The characters in Jane Rogers first short story collection are each blessed with an unwavering conviction. Buoyed up on self-belief, they enthuse, take calculated risks, and refuse to be deterred by the odds stacked against them. But just as Rogers compassion as a writer endears us to their cause, her keen eye shows how fine the balance can be between conviction and self-delusion. At times, her subject seems to be the fallibility of any point of view, the persistence of blind spots no matter how careful or intelligent the viewer. Hers are not unreliable narrators, merely human ones diverse, contradictory, imperfect. Indeed it is often their flaws that beguile us.