It Doesn’t Matter When

Happy New Year and let’s hope 2025 sees an end to the cruel genocide in Palestine and all the barbaric war criminals – all of them – held to account. Let’s hope 2025 sees the liberation of Palestine because, as Nelson Mandela knew so well, ‘Our freedom is incomplete without the liberation of the Palestinians.’

For me, as for millions across the world, 2024 was focused on protesting, boycotting, blockading arms factories, mounting campaigns against Israeli-supporting entities, and making new and lifelong friends in the process. Let’s hope that 2025 sees the triumph of good over evil.

My New Year began with something beautiful and unexpected. It began with an in-depth and heart-stopping review of my recently published collection of short stories and flash fiction. The review is a poem in itself and I’m deeply moved that a fellow writer, Paul Trembling, wrote his response with such care, compassion, and deep insight. It’s a huge privilege to be included on his Best Reads 2024 and I thank him with all of my heart.

Here’s what Paul wrote, and the link to his blog as well as the book are below:

This is a short collection of very short stories – just over a hundred pages, two or three pages at most in each story. But it is not an easy read.

It is not easy because the stories are often dark. Some are outright horror, but many are disturbing or (the word that first came to mind) harrowing in both content and subject matter. They deal with the darker side of life. Loss, injustice, pain, anger. Even those with a lighter side are at most, bittersweet. Take, for example, the stories that deal with the fading and passing of a much loved father. In some ways, quite uplifting, as they show someone at the end of life who is still full of joy and gratitude: they left me hoping that I might show some of those qualities when my time comes. But non-the-less, it is loss, and it is grieving.

It is also not easy because they are sometimes very subjective. They come from a unique point of view, from the writer’s very personal perspective, and she does not dilute her vision to make it more palatable or accessible. Many of these stories present an intellectual challenge, you have to take time to ponder and think on what is being said. And sometimes I found myself having to simply accept what I read, not understanding but letting the flow of the words carry me towards a deeper connection.

And what words they are! Lizzie Eldridge has a talent for vividness, for descriptions that give a whole new way of looking at the world, a way of seeing things that may not be comfortable but which carry a powerful reality into the readers mind. There are no cliches here!

Sad, unpleasant, challenging or just difficult to grasp, these are stories which give the opportunity to share something deep and real. To stand alongside people in darkness. To perhaps even develop some empathy for those whose life experience is so different from our own.

‘Poetry is there, it’s there in everything’ Eldridge says in one of these stories (All that have dark sounds, page 37). In this collection she shows us what that means.

Review by Paul Trembling

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