Doppelgangers

Twelve-ish. Shade in the Murillo gardens, as satisfying as lemonade. In the heat, just for a moment, Miguel stood in front of me. The old Miguel, not the one we've got now. The fuzzy image held its hand out and led me to the old Arab wall. When we were first married, we tried to climb it in the middle of the night. A celebration. 'This wall's been here hundreds of years,' Miguel said. 'If we can conquer that, we can conquer anything.' I believed him. I open my eyes and he's gone.

In these slippery stories the truth and the possible weave as unexpected lives, complicated minds and exotic spaces are sketched in with nimble words and quick wit. Ghosts torment from the past; future selves write back; the lost look about, find themselves watched, are lead astray.

Keep company with thieves and murdering artists, with the couple who miss the ferry for their make-or-break holiday; the mayonnaise deliveryman who becomes a reluctant golddigger, and the psychoanalyst and his GP wife who investigate a local widow's naked appearances in church.

Between these pages you can never be sure quite who you'll meet next, but you can be sure that you're in safe hands. An intriguing new collection from a writer you'll want to keep an eye on.

‘An audacious imagination and stylistic brio...full of surprises, it is a fine collection’ D. M. Thomas

‘These highly entertaining stories intrigue, amuse, surprise and unsettle all at once... with a confidence and verve that make this collection a cracking good read’ --Lindsay Clarke

‘Mark Blayney is a visionary’ Victor Pemberton

-- Publisher: Parthian Books
Doppelgangers (German for ‘a ghostly duplicate of a living person’) is a very fine collection of short stories. Mark Blayney writes with seemingly effortless control to create characters and locations that bring the chill of distance, the warmth of reconciliation, and the sights and sounds of villages and towns across the world, offering a feast of captivating images, thoughts and dialogue. The heat of Spain plays across the pages of ‘Four Tales from Seville’. The characters are losing and finding love; relationships flower, collapse, grow and expand. A woman in the first of the quartet, ‘Fiesta’, has come to Eduardo’s bar (which features in each of the tales) to meet her ex. He, true to form apparently, does not materialise, but his doppelganger does. In remembered moments of happiness, he turns and encourages her to climb the old Arab wall, puts a shoe tenderly on her foot. This is the town where their relationship blossomed, but the hall where they danced is being knocked down and the woman remembers Miguel’s infidelity and unreliability. His ghost is beguiling, but his lack of care extinguishes the last of her feelings for him. In ‘The Woman in the Caves’, Mrs Limmidge’s husband is dead but she is being haunted by his ghostly, post-grave, extra-marital affairs and, in the small village by the sea in the quiet of pre-war England, her outrage expresses itself in ways that shock the villagers. The doctor and her psychologist husband are called in but the doctor, whilst seemingly there to help, has her own hidden troubles. Mrs Limmidge’s rather ruthless landlord is the identical twin brother of her dead husband; could it be that the ‘ghost’ she sees with other women is not dead at all? And is the psychologist husband just a little too comfortably predictable for the doctor to remain entirely faithful? The twist at the end of this story is in the style of the era it is set in. Blayney is playing delightfully with the untrammelled melodrama of 1930s thrillers. With each story in this collection there is a sense of the unexpected and often truly surprising. There is definitely nothing predictable. Blayney has an obvious warmth and affection for the many different characters he has created, drawing the reader into overt sympathy with such mavericks as the unrepentant pick-pocket in ‘The Thief’ and the larger-than-life statue who indiscriminately carries out the murderous thoughts of her creator in ‘Death and the Maiden’. Each story is handled with the delicate and dexterous touch of a writer whose skill and control make this a very readable collection. -- Lucy Walter @ www.gwales