Sugar and Other Stories

Antonia Byatt was born in 1936, in Shieffield , England. She was a journalist and wrote novels . Among these acclaimed novels we can find Shadow of a Sun and Still Life.
Sugar and Other Stories contains eleven short stories , which all basically deal with love , fear
and relationships between people . I chose this book because I usually like short stories and the
subject of those seemed interesting . In the story Racine and the Tablecloth the main character is Emily Bray . Emily is a kid who lives in a boarding school , she is a very intelligent girl but has no friends , maybe because she's kind of an early feminist in a catholic school . She grows up there and the headmistess , Mrs. Chrichton-Walker , seems to hate Emily in a way which has no sense because the girl is only fourteen . Emily Bray's character is very interesting because she's complicated and somtimes acts in a weird , almost absurd way .
The July Ghost is a story about a man who was just dumped by his girlfriend and he can't get over it . The man needs another place to live so he rents a room in a woman's house . The weirdness of the woman troubles a little the young man but when he gets to see the husband , he kinda understands it . Noel , the husband, is a journalist who is pretty much never home and when he finally comes he fights with his wife . The young man ,who is a writer , has a lot of work to do therefore he decides to sit in the wonderful garden but children keep bothering him with their screams or their lost balls they'd like to retrieve. By a beautiful summer day , the writer's attention is caught by a kid who lies on the branches of a tree next to the fence of the house , the kid has beautiful blond hair and a smile that illuminates the place . One day the young man sees the boy leaving the kitchen as though it were his home , so the man decides to talk to the woman about it . She says that it must have been a friend of her son who died in a car crash . But when the writer describes the kid an expression of horror appears on the woman's face : it was her lost son he saw on that tree . Since then woman and the young man have a weird relationship because she usually was a strict woman but now she often cries or shouts as if the "ghost" seen by the man had driven her mad . The madness and the grief of the two characters is touching and makes the reader think twice . The characters of each one of the stories are unpleasant ,weird,touching, lovely or shocking.