Set throughout Glasgow, Colette Paul’s poignant, sometimes hilarious stories follow a range of ordinary people negotiating the pitfalls of grown-up life – unplanned pregnancies, difficult exes, misbehaving children, sick pets, middling jobs, and returning to familiar places that no longer feel like home.
These are no simple tales of despair, however. With pitch-perfect dialogue and understated wit, A Complete Success wryly and intimately captures the isolation and miscommunication of middle age, the resonating impact of childhood failures, and the unshakable, untranslatable nature of the past.
In these compelling, unfailingly compassionate portraits of the complexity of modern Scottish life, Paul re-affirms her status as one of the country’s most essential writers of short fiction.
"[A Complete Success] is sharply observed collection which finds comedy and sadness in the ordinary lives of ordinary characters – teenage girls, middle-aged divorcees, a man facing his last night alone in hospital. The stories are linked by a sense of lives in transition, with the attendant fear, exhilaration, and sense of loss those moments can bring. Time after time, characters struggle to understand and communicate their feelings, to their loved ones and to themselves. Despite the melancholy theme, the stories are shot through with humour and lightness, a sense of life in all its complicated messiness."
– Center for New Writing, Leicester
Praise for Whoever You Choose To Love:
"Fiction that shouldn’t be missed."
– Ali Smith, The Guardian
‘Stunningly perceptive, slick, quirky, powerful.’
– Henry Sutton, Esquire
‘So compelling it’s a wrench to put down.’
– Shari Low, Daily Record
‘Ordinary moments captured in transparent prose,with powerful undercurrents of meaning.’
– Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday
‘Wonderful.’
– Lottie Moggach, Time Out
‘A writer who knows her own mind, a mind that’s well worth knowing.’
– David Robinson, The Scotsman
“Impressive.”
– Gerard Woodward, TLS
