The Siren of Salamanca
by Brenda Ray
ISBN 978-1-905599-43-1
Price £9.99
'Beyond the buildings, I can rise up now, above the cornfields, above the trees towards the blue mountains. A single shadow ripples over the stubble like a passing cloud. I have returned. I have come back. I am home.'
Return Journey
In this evocative collection of fourteen stories, nothing is quite what it seems. A girl is haunted by the story of a child who vanished from her grandmother’s house many years before. A resistance fighter tells her tale in an alternative England of the 1940s. A schoolboy becomes obsessed by a girl whose name appears on a war memorial. Two boys delivering newspapers discover a severed human head. Unruly children provoke a strange woman they encounter on a tour of Italy, alas for them, while other children are haunted by a strange doll they dig up in a suburban garden. Lovers are parted by the Spanish Civil War. A workplace romance precipitates jealousy and murder. And in the title story, a successful lawyer cheats on his wife whose doppelganger pursues him through the beautiful Spanish city of Salamanca.
Brenda Ray was born in Derby, where she still lives. She has worked at various times in librarianship and as a creative writing tutor. In the 1980s she worked as a free-lance playwright, with professional productions at a number of venues. In the 1990s, she returned to education to take a degree in Photographic Studies at the University of Derby. She has three grown-up daughters and one grandson. She now concentrates mainly on the short story form and her work is set largely in the East Midlands and in Spain, the country that haunted her as a child. The title story, The Siren of Salamanca, was the winner of the Allianz Cornhill Short Story Competition at the Guildford Book Festival in 2005.
Published by Leaf Printing Service for the author.
Order direct from the author brendaray@hotmail.co.ukÂ
