Personal Velocity

Rebecca Miller's collection of short stories covers many themes: sexuality, compromise, fate, motherhood, infidelity, being single, wanting to be single, age, class, desperation and an overriding will to survive.

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Sexuality, compromise, fate, motherhood, infidelity, being single, wanting to be single, age, class, desperation and an overriding will to survive - Rebecca Miller brings it all in to play in her dazzling collection of short stories. She is superb at conveying the complexities, frustrations and simple triumphs of women's lives, bringing her seven eponymous heroines to life in these stories with a simple gesture or a turn of phrase. There's Greta, a smart but not, at first sight, ambitious New York editor who gets her big break and ends up editing her own life too, expunging her husband like a redundant paragraph. And the sassy and defiant Delia, whose means of empowerment is, it seems, to trade one abusive partner in for yet another lose. Or the child Nancy, who likes to see how long she can be in a room without her father noticing her. Nancy's record, to date, is one hour, seventeen minutes and thirty-four seconds... Told with wit, wisdom and an acutely perceptive eye, these are bite-sized slices of life that will strike a chord in every reader.