![]() ![]() Water entered his shirt cuffs and his shirt back ballooned. ![]() Skates stirred up sand and rose to the surface as he walked by them. She liked to think he was still walking under the water. He walked into the ocean one day and he did not stop walking. Murphy’s description of the husband’s suicide is particularly poignant: Armed with her husband’s quailing gun, the mother stalks closer and closer, reliving her memories of her husband with every step she takes toward the bear. The boy is playing by a pond close to their home while a bear stalks through the apple trees nearby. The title story (which was selected for The O’Henry Prize Stories 2007 anthology) concerns a widow and her son struggling with their grief following the husband’s suicide. Still, persistent readers will be rewarded with a book that eventually reveals a treasure trove of tiny, graceful moments filled with love and hope, chances for redemption, and rebirth. ![]() The clues Murphy’s narrators leave behind do lead eventually to the heart of her stories, but even then they are more like trails of breadcrumbs than handwritten maps. ![]() The stories contained within are spare and elegant, most clocking in at no more than four or five pages.įair warning: This is not the kind of fiction that holds the reader’s hand. Twenty years after her first short story collection, Yannick Murphy returns to the form with In a Bear’s Eye, the follow-up book to her highly acclaimed 2007 novel Signed, Mata Hari. ![]()
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