The Happiest Days - Tapa dura

A brilliant collection of short stories from an outstanding new voice in contemporary fiction.

Happy days have their souring. In this remarkable debut, Cressida Connoly explores the lives of children and young people who, in the wake of events that alter everything, find themselves split like stone. A conversation on a trip to the zoo – words which can’t be clutched back – heralds the end of a family; a boy watches his father fold Aunt Rose in his arms and loses his vocation; in an alarming account of sibling rivalry, a young girl becomes jealous of the attention afforded her dying sister.

Each of these finely crafted stories is its own forceful and separate world where familiar emotions – love, loss, jealousy, loneliness – are dissembled and show anew.

Cressida Connolly, Cyril Connolly’s daughter, was born in 1960. She is a reviewer and freelance journalist and recently books editor of Tatler.