Twists in the Tale

With the exception of the romance " A Face in a Corridor," which is a small novel or novella at the end of the collected stories, each is like a portrait so you might forget a detail of location or story but you can't quite forget the main characters. This was true whether the character was the deluded and pitiable schizophrenic Sam Baldock, who believed he heard the voice of Beethoven and had to be escorted, for his own sanity, to the 'Beethoven Wohnung, Museen de Stadt Wien' (Beethoven museum in Vienna), or whether the character is the more stable nurse Miranda, in the story Voices of a Hypnotist. Miranda was I thought difficult to forget for her pleasant naivety and vulnerability in the hands of the less than professional hypnotist in London's elite Harley Street. The style is very visual. In "The Parchment Recipes" and "Father's Helping Hand" you're crept out by some eerie and fully fleshed-out characters who. It's a bit like the numb feeling you can have after coming out of a film like Schindler's List - except that Twists in the Tale stories are, generally, much sunnier and, in one sense, perhaps more uplifting than SL. Liz W - Bristol, England

I'm not generally persuaded by ghost stories and to be fair only three of the stories actually imply some form of the supernatural but it's likely fair to say that these stories are unique, because of the way the author hints at ghosts without getting in to bed with them, so to speak. When Emily tries to "reach out" to her dead husband, Berny, in The Parchment Recipes, we don't see or have implied an apparition yet there is an overwhelming sense of presence and definitely a convincing handling of the idea that spirits can - through one psychology or another - tenuously connect. Although Nickford is a condensed writer, economical with back story, I agree with Barbara Erskine's comment and, like her, these stories did "make me want to keep reading". - Mark Shillingham