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Return
13 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2021
About the author
David Frankel
6 booksDavid Frankel is a writer and artist. He was born in Salford and spent his youth lurking around the westerly fringes of Manchester. For a long time he worked as an artist, but writing was always there in the background, and eventually took over. Since then his stories have been published in anthologies and magazines, and have won prizes or been shortlisted in numerous competitions. His first collection, 'Forgetting Is How We Survive', was shortlisted for the 2024 Edge Hill Prize.
'An unforgettable collection. Frankel is a fearless explorer of the perilous edges of life, where loss, shame and desire haunt and beguile. As readers, we trespass in derelict landscapes, abandoned homes and secret lives. We navigate by glimpse and echo, travelling switchbacks of time and teetering at brinks as big as sinkholes. Here, possibilities glimmer, mystery is sometimes breached, and, just occasionally, beauty flashes like a survival flare.'
Alison MacLeod, TENDERNESS
‘In David Frankel's remarkable stories the everyday is at once strange and threatening, the setting for both beautiful and terrible events. Frankel maps the edgelands, the fringes, the marginalised. His theme is the ways in which we are haunted and shaped by memories and experiences that are inherently unreliable. This is a brilliantly unsettling debut.’
Ben Tufnell, THE NORTH SHORE
'David Frankel’s sharp, alluring fragments read like reports from a disturbing world that, with gradual alarm, we realize is the same one we’re standing in. In these eerie commentaries, we feel flashes of Borges’ Labyrinths and Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, though neither can fully prepare us for what we are about to experience. Dark-ravaged, ecclesiastical, rain-lashed, these are stories from a reality that before we glimpsed only in the corner of our eye, but now grows bigger, closer, presses in on us, urgently, with fervour.' Ashley Stokes, author of Gigantic
'In short pieces full of vivid images, David Frankel goes out into the derelict edgelands of our messed-up society and encounters a strange, forlorn beauty in those places that defy the advertisers and financiers. ‘The tranquillity of negation,’ he calls what he finds there, in that zone of dread and grace, where the overlooked inhabitants find consolation in oblivion. A brief, marvellous, haunting book, reminiscent of Sebald and Sinclair.' David Swann, author of Season of Bright Sorrow
'An unforgettable collection. Frankel is a fearless explorer of the perilous edges of life, where loss, shame and desire haunt and beguile. As readers, we trespass in derelict landscapes, abandoned homes and secret lives. We navigate by glimpse and echo, travelling switchbacks of time and teetering at brinks as big as sinkholes. Here, possibilities glimmer, mystery is sometimes breached, and, just occasionally, beauty flashes like a survival flare.'
Alison MacLeod, TENDERNESS
‘In David Frankel's remarkable stories the everyday is at once strange and threatening, the setting for both beautiful and terrible events. Frankel maps the edgelands, the fringes, the marginalised. His theme is the ways in which we are haunted and shaped by memories and experiences that are inherently unreliable. This is a brilliantly unsettling debut.’
Ben Tufnell, THE NORTH SHORE
'David Frankel’s sharp, alluring fragments read like reports from a disturbing world that, with gradual alarm, we realize is the same one we’re standing in. In these eerie commentaries, we feel flashes of Borges’ Labyrinths and Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, though neither can fully prepare us for what we are about to experience. Dark-ravaged, ecclesiastical, rain-lashed, these are stories from a reality that before we glimpsed only in the corner of our eye, but now grows bigger, closer, presses in on us, urgently, with fervour.' Ashley Stokes, author of Gigantic
'In short pieces full of vivid images, David Frankel goes out into the derelict edgelands of our messed-up society and encounters a strange, forlorn beauty in those places that defy the advertisers and financiers. ‘The tranquillity of negation,’ he calls what he finds there, in that zone of dread and grace, where the overlooked inhabitants find consolation in oblivion. A brief, marvellous, haunting book, reminiscent of Sebald and Sinclair.' David Swann, author of Season of Bright Sorrow
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 4, 2023
This is a great short story about how a familiar place can harbour memory, so much so that it's recollection can be at odds with your own memory equally at odds with truth. This triumvirate of reminiscence creates a kind of uncanny valley, a liminal state of existence. Whilst the central event in "Return" seems clear, the protagonist is held by the constraints of memory, and ultimately his truth may not be ours. Recommended.
April 2, 2024
[Nightjar Press] (November 2021). SB. First Edition. 183/200. Signed. 13 Pages. Purchased from Nicholas Royle.
Well written. “The Swimmer” (John Cheever (1964)): with poker violence, without aquatics.
Well written. “The Swimmer” (John Cheever (1964)): with poker violence, without aquatics.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews