Independent publisher of long, short, and very short fiction
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Families and Other Natural Disasters is a collection of flash fiction about families, born into, created or found, how they support us or repress us, and the ways they can change us and shape us.
These stories are set in the UK and India, in aquariums, ballrooms and outer space. They follow women into volcanoes and out to sea. The characters search for lost brothers and lost selves and find prairie dogs and sea serpents.
In a debut collection rich in cultural detail, Anita Goveas beautifully explores the theme of family as one of the essential elements that hold the universe together.
Narratives that intersect continents, myths and folklore – a magical exploration of love, belief and the complications in relationships, with others and with oneself. Left me breathless and craving for more.
—Susmita Bhattacharya, author of The Normal State of Mind and Table Manners
This gorgeous collection brims with energy and sensuality. The characters negotiate their uncertain way through a world where the rituals of family are as elemental as volcanoes, tsunamis and earthquakes; where gods, demons and monsters take a place alongside grandmothers, uncles and lost twins. Richly observed stories to catch the heart and quicken the pulse.
—Sharon Telfer, two-time winner of the Bath Flash Fiction Award
Familial bonds are explored, stretched and transfigured into startling new forms in this collection. From the regional to the international to even the intersteller, there is both a directness and a sense of mystery in all of these stories. Subjects include volcanoes, tsunamis, zoos, sailing, dancing, falling in and out of love, and finding acceptance, and the prose throbs with sensory details and an elemental power. Varied and inventive in terms of character, cultural details and structure, this is a welcome and deeply satisfying debut.
—Farhana Khalique, Word Factory Apprentice and editor at Desi Reads
Anita Goveas is British-Asian and based in London. She was first published in the 2016 London Short story prize, was a Word Factory flash of the month winner in 2017, a 2018 Creative Futures Literary Award winner (Bronze), and is one of the London Library’s 2019 Emerging Writers. She was nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfictions and a Pushcart prize in 2018, and has two stories in Best Microfictions 2019.
Neil Willcox –
One of the sections of this book of flash fiction is titled Families; presumably therefore the other categories of natural disasters are Fire, Water, Wind and Love.
Families, and food, and clothing (especially shoes), and growing up, and love weave their way throughout all the stories. The opening story What Really Gets You Is The Rising Heat, a tale of a volcano that is a family curse, effortlessly offers the narrator’s background, her Indian family and her British background, single items of clothing, and a deserted ricepot, on its way to firstly underlining the metaphor, then transcending it in the final paragraph.
What Really Get You Is The Rising Heat is both my favourite, and also exemplifies the themes of this collection. There’s more though, not just iterations on the same topics. Some highlights include Finding Venkat, about aquariums and only learning who people are when they’re gone. Magic and Candlelight captures being a teenager and not fitting in in a handful of well-observed sentences. And Reverse uses a turn around the table while playing Uno to show how well, and how badly, a family know each other.
This slim volume of flash fiction circles ideas of families, brilliant and terrible and inevitable, distant and close, disasters and recoveries. There are clever examinations of what family means and does, and in the best pieces there are witty or extraordinary transformations of what family can be.
Read This: For a set of short punchy stories about the landscape of family
Don’t Read This: If you want long meditations, all this is pretty short
Disclosure: As noted I have been a fan of some of these pieces when they were published elsewhere and Anita sent me a review copy
Raluca Comanelea –
A vibrant flash fiction collection, Families and Other Natural Disasters, brings into the fiction discourse connections and disconnections among most intimate and blood-related individuals who reflect to the readers that power of resilience found in each of them. Through the lens of sharp cultural observations, bold, outrageous, yet never judgmental, family traditions are applauded, unveiled, sometimes gently ridiculed, yet with loving honesty and earthly attachment.
Families and Other Natural Disasters embarks its readers on a pilgrimage, homage to a life lived in the vicinity of natural elements, animate souls, cooked foods, the pangs and pleasures of the physical body and mind. Each flash melts into the following one, with minimal gaps of an intimate nature made for being rethought and shuffled by the reader. And the reader is there, with the characters, sharing into the transient, catastrophic episodes, small moments we call life.
The sections governing the collection whispers ‘earthly elements,’ as each guides every flash narrative towards a manifestation of one element: WATER screams impending tsunamis as when life happens while reading a book or when deciding to forget an argument. FIRE catapults a fiery mother and a wedding album meant to be burned, for all the past attachments and bitter recollections of memory. WIND shows minute observations turned into habits. With sharp awareness, the shifts in the currents surrounding people are exposed, obliging them to take control over their lives, yet letting go in a random act of surrender. LOVE splits physical oneness and melts distance into separation; feelings stirred by a hospital bed expose the impending nature of red death and alienation. FAMILIES are encapsulated in the stories passed down to younger generations. Capsules of maxims on marriage and homelife, career and endings, witty yet comical, show that we, in the end, are but dancing chemical elements.
Barbara Billington –
A vibrant and varied collection of flash fiction revolving around families and their influence on individuals. Modern life in the UK and Asian culture combine with the everyday and the fantastical to create an intricate and highly enjoyable whole.