- Jubilee offer: spend £10 or more on any product sold by Amazon.co.uk on or before June 6 and you can buy The Diamond Jubilee A Classical Celebration Album for just £2.50 Here's how (terms and conditions apply)
Insignificant Gestures
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Insignificant Gestures for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
A refugee finds his face has disappeared from the mirror. Lost on a mountain, a fell runner puts her brain into reverse. A traumatised woman realises she can slip in and out of the minds of the passersby. In a city where nothing is at it should be, a lone nurse plays peek-a-boo with an abandoned baby. Twenty-five stories about exile and belonging. This first collection by award winning writer Jo Cannon explores that it means to be an outsider. Sometimes surreal, always perceptive, these stories celebrate the unexpected interactions that alter lives. 'To read Jo Cannon is to enter the world of the displaced, the dispossessed, and to emerge with a new understanding. She writes with integrity and compassion, and her stories resonate long after the final words have been read.' Zoe King, editor of 'Cadenza' 'Jo Cannon's writing is engaging and thought provoking, with a quirky gentleness in the prose. Her stories gradually reveal string universal themes that continue to 'sing' long after the reader has put down the work.' Vanessa Gebbie, editor of 'Short Circuit - a guide to the art of the short story'
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A memorable short story collection from a talented début author.
Cannon's tales are beautifully written, often with a surreal, dystopian edge - societies on the brink of meltdown, individuals struggling to survive. Her African stories are vivid - the author lived there for a time - and those set in the UK, like 'The Spaces Between' give us glimpses of fragmented, falling-down cities, and people on the run from a collapsing society. It's not a bleak selection, though; her characters are resilient and hopeful, from the ageing lovers in 'Love On The Rocks' to the couple who grow old in stopped traffic in 'Jam'. And she's got a sense of humour, too - the cross-dressing protagonist of 'New Look' and the feisty heroine of 'Evo-Stik and the Bigamist' were real favourites of mine.
With twenty-five stories, Insignificant Gestures is brilliant value for money - excellent writing that will stick with you long after you've finished the book.
Cannon's tales are beautifully written, often with a surreal, dystopian edge - societies on the brink of meltdown, individuals struggling to survive. Her African stories are vivid - the author lived there for a time - and those set in the UK, like 'The Spaces Between' give us glimpses of fragmented, falling-down cities, and people on the run from a collapsing society. It's not a bleak selection, though; her characters are resilient and hopeful, from the ageing lovers in 'Love On The Rocks' to the couple who grow old in stopped traffic in 'Jam'. And she's got a sense of humour, too - the cross-dressing protagonist of 'New Look' and the feisty heroine of 'Evo-Stik and the Bigamist' were real favourites of mine.
With twenty-five stories, Insignificant Gestures is brilliant value for money - excellent writing that will stick with you long after you've finished the book.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Jo Cannon brings her experiences as a city centre GP to bear in this excellent debut collection. Many of these stories have won prizes in competitions or been published in highly competitive places - unsurprisingly then, she is very skilled at the genre. She has a real knack for imagery and sympathetic characters - many of them society's outcasts. Despite the often gritty material, the tone is hopeful and upbeat. and the overriding message: we humans must all take care of each other. Highly recommended.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I'm lucky to have come across this collection of 25 tightly constructed, sparingly written short stories, of exile, displacement, and strange inner worlds from the Sheffield based author, Jo Cannon. The stories, most written in a an intimate first person whisper, deal with the psychological iceberg floating invisibly beneath the surface. The protagonists, whether they are the offspring of a terror bomber, or a spouse unwilling to allow treatment for his sick wife, are attempting to make sense of a world in which they feel marginal, uncomprehending and powerless.
it's a world where more is a expressed through silences and the apparently insignificant gestures of the title story than in spoken sentences, where the seemingly abnormal becomes normal. A social worker in the highly amusing 'Evo Stick and the Bigamist' ( technically a trigamist she points out ) reflects that she 'wrote case studies about dysfunctional families that seemed normal to me' In the African bush, a young woman who 'walked from the village and her father's anger' for the love of a truck driver returns seven years later sick and emaciated to sleep in her younger sister's arms. 'I haven't mentioned the truck driver' she says as an act of silent kindness. I'm sure many of us spend more time in this sort of shadow world than we like to think, which is why we can relate to this collection.
Some sorties verge on the surreal, but have the same kind of eerie connection to reality, such as the woman who spends her life in a traffic jam, or wheter ' I get muddled about whether things are real or whether I just thought of them'. We've all had days like that. There are also some beautifully crafted parses and descriptions- ' a daddy longlegs danced, seventies style', and a multitude of others.
These bite size stories, a kind of love child of Alan Bennet and Lesley Glaister, are perfect commuter material and deserve a wide readership.
it's a world where more is a expressed through silences and the apparently insignificant gestures of the title story than in spoken sentences, where the seemingly abnormal becomes normal. A social worker in the highly amusing 'Evo Stick and the Bigamist' ( technically a trigamist she points out ) reflects that she 'wrote case studies about dysfunctional families that seemed normal to me' In the African bush, a young woman who 'walked from the village and her father's anger' for the love of a truck driver returns seven years later sick and emaciated to sleep in her younger sister's arms. 'I haven't mentioned the truck driver' she says as an act of silent kindness. I'm sure many of us spend more time in this sort of shadow world than we like to think, which is why we can relate to this collection.
Some sorties verge on the surreal, but have the same kind of eerie connection to reality, such as the woman who spends her life in a traffic jam, or wheter ' I get muddled about whether things are real or whether I just thought of them'. We've all had days like that. There are also some beautifully crafted parses and descriptions- ' a daddy longlegs danced, seventies style', and a multitude of others.
These bite size stories, a kind of love child of Alan Bennet and Lesley Glaister, are perfect commuter material and deserve a wide readership.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Insignificant Gestures - Jo Cannon
INSIGNIFICANT GESTURES - JO CANNON
This fine collection encompasses a wide variety of situations, characters, and moods. Read more
This fine collection encompasses a wide variety of situations, characters, and moods. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Daniel
Writer who cares, genuinely
Cannon crafts with care, and here I do not mean only that the prose is exquisitely wrought, but that the stories ooze with a certain comforting care for the characters. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Adnan Mahmutovic
Buy it, borrow it or steal it...but definitely read it!
This is a wonderful book. Here are twenty five short stories about people who are different in some way; often on the very edge of society. Read more
Published 17 months ago by MCB
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192198663_.gif){kind=small}
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
