Author: Matthew J. Richardson

Words in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Fiction Junkies, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, CafeLit, Best Microfiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, and Shooter.

A Shadow World | Short Story

A shadow world, drawn long. It grows after the sun has crested, seeping out from the church spire and the echoing viaduct. Slow at first, it crawls across the cobbles, pushing against the midday glare.

It advances, just as it retreated. The gloom reaches long-fingered down alleys and into closes – pre-dusks slinking eagerly behind the gable-end and the high, dusty hornbeam. Up drainpipes and across windowsills the shadow slips, glazing no bar to its progress. 

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Trust | Book Review

Front cover of the novel 'Trust' showing a dark skyscraper set against a background of green

Trust

Hernan Diaz

402 pages

Paperback

Picador

2022

ISBN: 9781529074529

Review

‘Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail – we are ruined by forces beyond our control.’

Andrew Bevel, a fabulously rich Wall Street trader with a gift for seeing trends before others, and his young wife Mildred bask in 1920s New York. Theirs is a seemingly carefree existence filled with extravagance and speculation. It is only when the layers of their lives are peeled away that we uncover the shocking secrets hidden by their wealth.

‘Trust’ was a book which I dearly wanted to love. A puzzle book set in the jazz age, and a novels-set-within-novels structure to boot? What’s not to love? The book does deliver on some of these promises – 1920s New York is beautifully evoked and the introverted, frantic, obsessive world of the trader makes for compelling copy.

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Deposition | Short Story

There is something about English woodland. Real English woodland, I mean. Not that close-bound, imported Scandi stuff.

I don’t want to be that person who marvels at lonely clouds or tries to catch falling snowflakes, but there is always something happening in every square inch of the forest, from the macro down to the micro. There is the beauty of the overlapping leaves – the razored alders, the elegant crab-apples, the waxen oaks. Then there are the sounds – branches shifting above him, furred bows rubbing against bark strings and a subtle, tenor groan from some ageing monolith deeper in the copse.

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