Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Lucy Popescu

How to Gut a Fish by Sheila Armstrong – haunting short stories

‘A talent for disrupting our expectations’: Sheila Armstrong.
‘A talent for disrupting our expectations’: Sheila Armstrong. Photograph: PR

In her assured fiction debut, Sheila Armstrong combines unsettling themes with the commonplace and reveals a keen eye for detail. The author, who is originally from Sligo and now lives in Dublin, sets several of these stories in her home country. Lemons is a response to the eighth amendment campaign in 2018. A woman’s life is described in terms of her body: a home abortion is “a pulling from deep inside”, while a mastectomy is “negative space, like a scoop removed from an ice-cream tub”. With an impressive economy, Armstrong distils each passing decade into a few paragraphs.

In the title story, a fisherman recounts in meticulous detail the gutting of a mackerel. Written in the second person as a series of numbered points, it builds tension through Armstrong’s deft foreshadowing: “Look your fish in the eye: they say the last thing a man sees is imprinted on his pupil. You check every catch this way for your own reflection, but there is only a dark hole of fright.”

In Red Market, customers bid for a young woman’s organs. The horror is amplified because Armstrong’s country gathering feels so ordinary: the woman is trussed up and put on display “in between the diving hat and the roasting trays”.

Armstrong has a talent for disrupting our expectations and her prose is sensorily rich. In Dado, a story about a hit-and-run, “the spit-hot rage of teenage girls lingers in the black ink on the cubicle doors” of a school bathroom. An old man’s grief leaves him “untethered and the days carry him along in their surf”. In Mantis, the narrator compares the “whip-crack thud” of his domestic violence to the “whip-crack claw” of a mantis shrimp.

Her evocations of landscape are extraordinary and there’s a satisfying circularity to the collection. It opens with Hole and the night visitors to a field with a “fairy fort”, a ring of stones. It ends with Dome, a typical day at the beach. An image of the sea and the sky meeting memorably concludes this haunting collection.

How to Gut a Fish by Sheila Armstrong is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.