EDINBURGH-based Ruth Thomas creates likeable, humorous worlds with likeable, humorous characters in them, but her appeal is not simply the result of her cleverly conjuring empathy out of her readers.
We may very well recognise ourselves in the hu
man, everyday situations she creates, but it's not just the comfort of recognition that she offers.
In her stories, people are trying to negotiate through the world, groping for clues to how to live, how to cope, how to be happy, how to let the right things matter.
A lot of the tales in this third collection, yet another superb demonstration by Thomas of the short-storyteller's craft, show people at a crucial point in their lives, one of those threshold moments when things are about to change: they are about to move house, or have a baby, or they have started a new job, or are starting life as a working mother again. Even those seemingly at the end of things – after a divorce, for instance, or after the children have left home – are really, without realising it, poised on the cusp of something new.
We can all identify with these kinds of moments, but Thomas isn't happy simply to let us rest with easy identification: the potential for misunderstanding faces us as we stand on that threshold, just as much as recognition does.
In "Wonderful Age", for instance, a father is taking his one-year-old daughter to a baby's birthday party, an unusual event for him. He is caught literally on the threshold: the threshold of a bouncy castle "almost obliterating the doorway".
He must take off his shoes – big, maroon shoes that mark out the "exhibitionist" in him. But he struggles to get to know the other mothers there, unsure whether to flirt or compete, and he loses his shoes. For him, the party quickly becomes a scene of anxiety, as he frantically searches for the things that identify him, the way his daughter has identified him as a father.
In another threshold moment, in the story "Careless", Joseph has "entered a new world", that of accident and emergency. He had been working on a wooden box for his girlfriend, carving her name on it. Unfortunately, she decided to finish with him before he got her name completed.
As Joseph sits, endlessly waiting in one hospital room, then another, then another, always poised on the threshold of being treated but never actually receiving any attention, he reflects on the accident with the chisel that brought him here.
He had decided to finish carving her name anyway, and the chisel had slipped and cut him, leaving a mark, "a reminder of the small disasters which interrupt the sweetness of life".
Thomas is keen on the sweetness of life: a mother of three herself, she has included here eight stories that feature pregnancy or babies or children.
Even the elderly 80-year-old grandfather, surrounded by his family on his birthday, who all treat him, inevitably, like a child, winds up with a baby in his arms. There can be few more dramatic examples of being on the threshold than being at the beginning of your life, and Thomas's sense of wonder and joy at the birth of new things, new moments, new beings, combines with the terror of what those moments mean.
Some will loathe the domesticity of her world; some will complain that women should be writing about the big things in life like war and death and political change.
Some will fret at the lack of violence, the lack of threat to the "sweetness of life" she portrays here. But that would be to miss the point: that what is owned, or enjoyed or held dear can always be taken away, can always be lost.
There is nothing small about reminding us what matters in life. There is nothing trivial about those threshold moments, which often terrify us much more than thoughts of death and destruction ever can. Thomas's world may be full of "small disasters" but it's far more real than many a gritty, urban crime thriller.
