Mrs Calder and the Hyena

‘Mrs Calder is frail and distracted. She annoys her daughter by living in disorder, taking up with vagrants, hanging around churchyards and giving free rein to her imagination (she thinks about her doctor with no clothes on). But the real hindrances to right perception in this tale, and throughout Marjorie Ann Watts’s exhilarating second collection, produced at the tender age of ninety-eight, are not the fantasies by which we sustain ourselves but the suffocating illusions of others. Particularly those who want what’s best for us. Where is safe? Where can we start again? Whether in homes troubled by age and bereavement or foreign cities consumed by idealistic revolution, “there are no answers”, as Mrs Calder herself puts it, except to pick up these stories wherever we left off, and – gratefully – read on.’ – Will Eaves