True North: Selected Stories

Book excerpt: Princesses who never wanted to be rescued... debutantes who are unwilling to keep quiet about politics just to preserve their marriage prospects... fairy tale characters who question key motivations in their own, now-famous stories... The protagonists of Sara Maitland’s remarkable short fiction all seem to be bursting at the seams of their own characterisation, challenging our understanding of age-old narratives, and showing even the fundamentals of storytelling to be fluid, malleable and unreliable. Spanning over 40 years of writing, Sara Maitland’s Selected Stories brings together highlights from a phenomenal career in short fiction. Traditional folk stories, myths and fairy tales are expertly interrogated, modernised and given feminist and scientific re-readings. Drawing from classical, Norse, Inuit and other pagan mythologies, these stories find folkloric archetypes alive and well in every conceivable modern context. Formally innovative, emotionally edgy and deeply imbued with a sense of landscape, they speak to our abiding concerns about humanity’s relationship with the natural world, and the past’s uncanny ability to creep into our present and re-shape it, according to its own needs.