In White Ink
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In White Ink
Narrated by:
Sophie Jo Wasson
Buy Now for £13.72
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Narrated by:
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Sophie Jo Wasson
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By:
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Elske Rahill
Motherhood, nurture and violence – these are the themes of Elske Rahill's remarkable first collection, In White Ink. Rahill brings to life the psychological and physical reality of mothering, pregnancy and childbirth in ways that few others writers have attempted. Here is a biting realism, in the relations between men and women and in the expectations and failures of their assigned roles.
Each story is illumined by moments of harsh poetry. They are carefully crafted snapshots of our condition. In the title story, an isolated young mother is locked in to a custody battle with her abusive husband; 'Right to Reply' shows three generations of women confronting the terrible legacy of their family's past; in 'Toby', a woman obsessed with hygiene finally snaps, when she finds her home is infested with fleas. The precision of Rahill's prose, the stoicism of her unflinching narrative gaze, reveal characters caught up in violently emotional situations.
The version of motherhood found here is painful. Yet its endurance, as nature's greatest force, is brilliantly and compassionately rendered.©2017 Elske Rahill (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
This remarkable collection is a sometimes bleak, yet always compelling snapshot into maternity, nature, the inequality of social expectations and human compassion
Exquisite, savagely honest collection... Bleak, but acutely insightful'
Rahill has a keen sense of the varieties of sexual desire, of social inequality, grief and a withering eye for the ridiculous... [Her] stories will kiss you goodnight and then give you nightmares'
Rahill is a brilliant bloody writer – gossamer light prose laced with nuclear tipped torpedoes. I consumed these stories in one great greedy gulp. More please! (Rosita Sweetman)
Rahill offers a mix of mothers in her 11 stories, the most affecting of which is the first-person story of the titular In White Ink
An impressive debut
These stories draw you into their maternal arms then fling you to the gutter, leaving you baffled by the troubles you've witnessed in their deceptive warmth
A number of Irish debut short story collections were published this year; standouts were June Caldwell's Room Little Darker and Elske Rahill's eagerly anticipated In White Ink
[A] delicate, brutally honest collection
[Rahill's stories] fearlessly, nakedly, crash into the darker sides of real life
I can not think of a short story writer who is more precise and grave in her laying out of that theme... In White Ink captures women and mothers caught inside their lives; Rahill's art sets them free into ours'
Beautifully written - and sometimes very dark. It explores motherhood and its conflicts, articulating the unsayable about the maternal experience
Rahill is extraordinarily talented. She writes in a way that is both intellectual and intuitive
Rahill, an excellent writer, is never predictable
The title story stands out in the absolute precision of its rendition of a new mother's loss of agency to her overbearing and controlling male partner
These bleak dramas are stimulating and unsettling. Their force is felt all the more powerfully through the measured precision of Rahill's prose which is usually grounded in the exact immediacy of everyday detail. The best stories here are textured and unnerving
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