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Insignificant Gestures
 
 

Insignificant Gestures [Kindle Edition]

Jo Cannon
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)

Print List Price: £8.99
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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 passersby. In a city where nothing is as 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 what 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
'Jo Cannon's writing is engaging and thought provoking, with a quirky gentleness in the prose. Her stories gradually reveal strong universal themes that continue to 'sing' long after the reader has put down the work.' Vanessa Gebbie

Product details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 237 KB
  • Print Length: 123 pages
  • Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
  • Publisher: Pewter Rose Press (28 Jun 2011)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B0058ON8IO
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • X-Ray: Not Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #233,036 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent debut story collection 10 Dec 2010
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.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Short stories full of interest and heart 24 Nov 2010
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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Artful writing, Good medicine. 1 Feb 2013
Format:Paperback
Doctors have a career-long dilemma: Identify too much with your patients and their pain becomes yours. Eventually you burn out. Some detachment is needed for working sustainably and for making vital decisions dispassionately, addressing patients' real needs rather than ill-informed choices. Not enough empathy and you become cynical and neglectful, the most detested of doctors. As with medication, empathy and detachment must be prescribed in the right doses. But where do you put the pain left over? - Bottle it up until it hurts, or find a way to let it out? Many medics turn to writing for closure of things we'd rather not have seen, but few have the skill to do it well. In the right hands brevity can be devastating and that is the art of short-story writing. "Insignificant Gestures" is a remarkable demonstration of that skill in its own right, but to find it combined with such empathy for patients by a humane and courageous author is rare indeed. both as a medic and a writer I am green with envy for what Jo Cannon has achieved.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Insignificant Gestures - Jo Cannon 2 Nov 2011
By Daniel
Format:Paperback
INSIGNIFICANT GESTURES - JO CANNON

This fine collection encompasses a wide variety of situations, characters, and moods. The author is a doctor, an inner-city GP who also worked for a time in Africa, and the stories reflect these strands of her life. She writes with great insight about the immigrant experience in this country, but she is concerned with the everyday too: the joys and trials of family life, the subtleties of human relationships, urban demolition, dentists, and traffic jams.

Though the stories are each only a few pages long, they sometimes describe complex and serious matters. `Daddy's Girl' takes us into the life of a fundamentalist terrorist and his victims; while `Shutters' describes the obsessive-compulsive behaviour of an ex-soldier, keeping his ill and helpless wife hidden away from vital medical help. Another, `New Look', sheds light on the efforts of a transvestite man to obtain a cervical smear, and the delightfully unflappable female doctor who deals expertly with the situation. In `The Alphabet Diet' we learn of the regime of a young obese man: this week `kippers, Kit-Kats and kiwi-fruit.' These situations are described with compassion and understanding, as well as humour. And there is tragedy in Africa, where the title story of the collection is concerned with a young doctor burdened with guilt over a death he might have prevented; while in `Theresa's Spear' a nun realises too late that she needs more than the denying rules of her order, and the supposed love of a God in whom she has lost faith.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Significant stories 30 July 2011
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.
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