Bogies: two stories

by Rosalind Belben

Genres: Novella

207 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Rosalind Belben is an English novelist. She was born in 1941 in Dorset where she now lives. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her novel Our Horses in Egypt won the James Tait Black Award in 2007. Among her other books are Bogies, Reuben Little Hero, The Limit, Dreaming of Dead People, and Hound Music.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two novellas. The first, ‘Somewhere Else’, is almost all-dialogue interview between an unnamed woman and a series of interrogators: a fantastic satirical piece on a par with works like Sorokin’s The Queue or Pinget’s The Inquisitory. The second ‘Flight’, is a more conventional tale featuring a boring Bradford woman who finds a corpse while out walking her dog. The story moves through the tedium of her life, punctuated by visits from a teenage burglar, until her decision to leave at the end. Concise, assured, and steely prose.