Review of Used to be in the Short Review

I'm having a nice couple of days: hot on the heels of the review in Confingo, here's another really great review of Used to Be, this time in the inestimable Short Review. Reviewer Cath Barton discusses several of the stories in depth, and concludes:

Life is a series of might-have-beens, near-misses and what ifs. This is a tremendous collection of stories. They do not seek to be didactic, but may nonetheless give many of us who read them cause to reflect on the choices we have made in our own lives, and to be more mindful of the options which open in front of us every day.

The Short Review reviews Balancing on the Edge of the World

Issue 8 of The Short Review is now up, and it includes a pretty fabulous review by Melissa Lee-Houghton of my story collection Balancing on the Edge of the World .

She calls it 'a stunning debut collection by a writer whose prose deliberates its characters and themes with a keen sense of literary drama'. She also says of the stories that they are:

contemporary in the acutest sense without being limited to being fashionably modern ... Place and time are not necessarily pinned down in many of the stories, but rather swoon toward a universality which is wholly admirable ... The stories never feel forced, but prickle with a high-sensitivity to the themes which bleed through Baines’s concept of power: often nameless individuals dish out and receive humility, fear, violent threat, expectation ... Each story, though offering a heavily unreassuring perspective, feels weightless and tuned in, in the balance of the fickle order of things.

And here's what The Short Review says about me (!):

Her reputation is consistent amongst her peers and readers alike, as an innovative and committed writer of distinctly pure talent.

Eeek! Now I'll have to live up to that!

This seems to be a bumper issue, with reviews of nine other great-looking collections as well, and interviews with seven authors (including yours truly).