Best British Short Stories 2017 by Nicholas Royle

Best British Short Stories 2017 Reviews

• 
  JimZ

  I have read most of this collection (Best British Short Stories) of short stories dating back to the first volume in 2011. I have one, actually two, more volumes to go...2019 and the newly issued 2022.
  
  If four or five stories are 3.5 stars or higher, then to me it’s worthwhile to read the collection. And so this book met that bar (6/20 >3.5 stars). The first story, ‘Reversible’, was cleverly written — it started out with an event that had just happened at the end of the story and worked its way all the way to the beginning event. I loved ‘Reunion’ — one of those stories where you think you know what is going to happen and then you’re blindsided. Two of the longer stories I did not like at all...one of them was by a famous Scottish writer, James Kelman, who is known for a number of novels including How Late it Was (Booker Prize 1994).
  
  1. Reversible – Courttia Newland — 4 stars 🙂 🙃
  2. General Impression of Size and Shape — Rosalind brown — 3.5 stars
  3. As You Follow — Giselle Leef — 2.5 stars
  4. Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty — Jay Barnett — 2.5 stars
  5. While the Nightjar Sleeps — Andrew Michael Hurley — 2.5 stars
  6. The Sea in Me — Krishan Coupland — 3 stars
  7. Safe — Vesna Main — 3.5 stars
  8. The First Hard Rain — Sophie Wellstood — 2.5 stars
  9. Never Thought He’d Go — Francoise Harvey — 4 stars
  10. Reunion — Peter Bradshaw — 4.5 stars 🙂 🙃
  11. The Dark Instruments — Laura Pocock — 3 stars
  12. Filamo — Irenosen Okojie — DNF, 1 star ☹️
  13. Treats —Lara Williams — 4.5 stars 🙂 🙃
  14. The Wind Calling — Deirdre Shanahan — 2.5 stars
  15. Ariel — David Rose — 3 stars
  16. Is-and — Claire Dean — 2.5 stars
  17. This Skin Doesn’t Fit Me Anymore — Eliot North — 2 stars
  18. Words and Things to Sip — James Kelman — 1.5 stars ☹️
  19. Waves — Niven Govinden — 2 stars
  20. Language — Daisy Johnson — 2 stars
• 
  Alan

  Excellent collection, ranging from stand-back-and-admire-the-fireworks pieces like Daisy Johnson's where language actually causes physical pain and Okojie's Filamo, involving time travelling monks and 'Siamese green lizards who shared an Adam's apple, a piece of jabuticaba fruit which grew another layer of purple skin each time you touched it..' etc., to more quietly realistic ones like Rosalind Brown's story of adultery and birdwatching, and the pay-it-forward Treats by Lara Williams. There's a couple where you slip in the blood on the floor, Vesna Main's gutwrenching Safe, and Courttia Newland's opener 'Reversible', and several with 'supernatural' elements including Laura Pocock's The Dark Instruments and Eliot North's This Skin Doesn't Fit Me Any More. Plus a great Kelman, almost the essence of man-in-a-pub Kelman.
• 
  Ryan

  Ray Carver once said short stories were closest in spirit to poems. Presumably that was a comment about their intensity, brevity; their common singularity of purpose.
  
  Personally I think it's more because you don't have to read the fucking things in order. Start in the middle, skip the opener, finish with that story with the fancy title? Fill your boots.
  
  Once again that's been my approach - and I was glad of it. Had I started with the first two stories in the anthology I wouldn't have bothered reading on. My inner snark can't help noting that the worst of the stories -musclebound, tedious, uninvolving - is by a UEA graduate. One story, 'Filamo', reads like a parody of Ben Okri. 'Ariel' is too slight.
  
  Luckily there were fresher dishes on the menu. James Kelman, in many ways the elder statesman of this book, did not disappoint - his stories rarely do. There were three names I had never heard of: Jay Barnett, Daisy Johnson, Andrew Michael Hurley. I finished each of their stories, the stallions of this stable, quite certain we'll be hearing more about them soon.
• 
  Des Lewis

  This book’s a marvel, my optimum taste, at a stretch. Now hawled open at last.
  
  The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
  Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
• 
  Owen Townend

  Anthologies are always a risk, let alone ones that make the bold declaration of being the best of the year.
  While Royle obviously has a multifaceted appreciation of the form, I cannot agree with most of his picks. They are stylistically impressive and feature some stunning images, but very few appealed to me in terms of plot.
  Further to this some tales baffled me not so much with their carefree stream of conscience as with the fact that they let such things go beyond a couple of pages. In my experience, stories with elements of automatic writing are refreshing but ought to end as soon as possible. After all there are less tolerant readers out there who may put the whole book down after a single page of it.
  Nevertheless there were still some excellent stories in this collection and even more that had a lot going for them but took the plot and characters in a direction with which I didn't agree.
  While I cannot say these are the best British short stories I've read of the previous year, they are certainly a fair representation of what interesting work has come out.
  
  Notable Stories
  
  • Reunion by Peter Bradshaw - I love a tale with a twist that makes far more sense than the seemingly obvious ending: lead me down this garden path.
  • The Dark Instruments by Laura Pocock - Once again the ending makes this fantasy piece which is a pity as I don't believe I completely understood it.
  • Filamo by Irenosen Okojie - I really struggled to keep up with this though, out of the numerous stream of conscience stories, it was the most fun.
• 
  Anne Green

  Engaging with fiction is an entirely subjective experience, nowhere more so than in reading the short story. It's almost impossible to apply the so-called rules of novel writing to the short story form which makes reading collections like this one an intriguing experience, not least in discovering what is deemed in an editor's eyes "the best". By their very nature short stories are enigmatic. Things are understated, suggested, sketched with a faint pencil, making an art of the skilful omission. Withholding is as necessary a part of the story as showing, provided the reader comes to the experience with a mind energetic enough to fill in the gaps or is impressed enough by lyrical prose that meaning becomes subservient to the form. Sometimes however the writer takes the licence too far and the gap between concept and outcome is too vast for the reader to bridge. That was the case for me with several of these stories. Others like Rosalind Brown’s beautiful story, “General Impression of Size and Shape” and Sophie Wellstood’s “The First Hard Rain” were examples of the short story form at its best.
• 
  Michael Jarvie

  A veritable curate's egg of a collection. The usual MA Creative Writing mafia are conspicuous between these pages, as might be expected. There is one familiar name amongst these writers - James Kelman - whose world-weary monologue bears his characteristic trademark. There's also a slight piece called "Ariel", another ("Reversible") that simply regurgitates the concept behind "Time's Arrow" and a work that is more an extract from an experimental novel than a short story in any meaningful sense, and which seems to go on forever - "Filamo".
• 
  James Kinsley

  The strength of any anthology is its variety - read something you don't care for, and it doesn't matter, as something different lies just over the page. But in truth, there's little here that doesn't hit the mark. Whimsy, mystery, otherworldly, the everyday, the straightforward and the opaque, there's variety a-plenty, and of a consistent quality.
  Hard to pick out highlights, but will mention Irenosen Okojie's baffling Filamo, Krishan Coupland's gently moving The Sea In Me, and Laura Pocock's menacing The Dark Instruments. Truth is, though, lots to enjoy in this fine collection.
• 
  P.D. Dawson

  An interesting mix of stories, some I found very good, others were boring and hard to connect with in my opinion, but in general I would say the individual story rating ranged between 3 and 5 stars, hence my overall rating of 4 as an average. So therefore, perhaps a rather inconsistent collection in my opinion, but then again, with such vastly different stories, an anthology such as this will struggle to connect its reader with all the stories.
• 
  Dan Coxon

  I always enjoy Nicholas Royle's 'Best British Short Stories' series, and this volume was no exception. As with all anthologies, some stood out more than others - stories by Laura Pocock, Niven Govinden and Daisy Johnson were personal favourites. If anything, the quality seemed a little more variable than other years, but they may just be a personal response (I dipped in and out of it more than usual, rather than reading in one steady flow). All in all another great volume, though.
• 
  James

  Some of the prose felt kind of amateurish, and for whatever reason it seemed like most of the stories would be categorized as noir. Maybe this is a trending theme in British story writing—I’ve not read much else, so I have no idea. In either case, overall this really was a pretty cool collection of stories for casual reading.
• 
  Barbara Joan

  A very mixed bunch. The two I thought really worth the description 'best' were Eliot North's 'This Skin Doesn't Fit Me Any More' and Sophie Wellstood's 'The First Hard Rain', both of which displayed more subtlety and depth than the others.
• 
  elin

  i read this for my short fiction writing module at uni and thought it helped quite a lot with observing and developing different techniques in my writing.
  
  as a reader, however, i enjoyed quite a few stories, like ‘the sea in me’ and ‘as you follow’ that really made me think, and were told really effectively, but some of the stories, such as ‘filamo’, could be quite confusing narratively and i wasn’t sure what was going on. so, all in all, a mixed bag for me.
• 
  Facundo Martin

  .
• 
  Facundo Martin

  .
• 
  Geraldine

  Didn't read enough to justify giving it a star rating.
  
  But I hated what I did read, the first three or four stories. Hated them all.
  
  I daresay if I had persevered I would have found one or more to my liking. But I fear I would have had to plough through heaps of pretentious twaddle before alighting on a rare gem.