Light Lifting is one of those rare debuts: a breathtakingly good collection of short fiction that heralds the arrival of a significant new talent: a suite of darkly urban, unflinching elegies. The seven stories each encompass a keenly observed, immersive world, and each carries the weight and impact of a novel. They are reminiscent of the work of Alice Munro at her best - rich and deep, merciless and utterly thrilling.
MacLeod's stories are shorn of sentimentality but drenched in an amorphous yearning, an omnipresent sense of loss and peril that seeps into even the happiest moments. 'Good Kids', about a family of four boys and their relationship with the boy who lived briefly in the rental house across the street, exemplifies a sense of sharp nostalgia: 'Our sticks were Koho and Sherwood shafts with plastic blades that had been wickedly curved over the front burner of the stove and we usually played with tennis balls that were too small and kept falling down through the grates of the sewer.' These reminiscences are balanced with keen insight into the casual, almost inevitable brutality that even 'good' kids are capable of.
Despite that underlying sense of sadness, the characters in Light Lifting aren't adrift. They're rooted firmly in the real world of work and family. These are elemental stories of work and its bonds, of tragedy and tragedy barely averted, but also of beauty and love and moments of pure transcendence.
