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Black Milk

Tina Makereti

‘Despair sat on her shoulders where her wings should have been. Darkness consumed her, the quivering lip of a dying abalone, grease in the barrel of a gun.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for the Pacific.

Body Language

Juhea Kim

‘Always being pulled in opposite directions was how she remained upright.’

Cow and Company

Parashar Kulkarni

‘And now there were four of them stepping out to look for a cow.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize overall winner.

Eat You Up

Kathleen Murray

‘Wasn’t it possible the mental shit would leave the kid’s brain, cell by cell, just by doing normal stuff?’

In the Garden

F.T. Kola

‘I too quiver. I resonate with the music that vibrates within her.’

Kiddio at the Wedding

Mary O’Donoghue

‘If he fell in I would jump straight after, I would plumb through water not cold so much as oily, and dark as a dirty wine bottle.’

Ladivine

Marie NDiaye

‘We were hoping for a communion, and that communion never came.’

Mayo Oh Mayo

Nuala O’Connor

‘Tonight there is a moon-rind, a nicotined fingernail, hanging low over the lake; above it, a Swarovski sparkler of a star.’

Navigation

Lisa McInerney

‘His aberrations are formless; he imagines his insanity as a sort of gaseous molecule, looking to react with bugs and glitches.’

Our Private Estate

Dave Lordan

‘Dozens of votive candles held aloft by mourners in white suits in procession. So much white, as if death could be engulfed in it, as if death itself was not an all-engulfing whiteness.’

Party, Party

Belinda McKeon

‘Arlo’s matinee sleekness was so difficult to bear’

Pure Gold

John Patrick McHugh

‘That icy fear of the morning after slithered back: why does summer always feel like it belongs to someone else?’

Sarandí Street

Silvina Ocampo

‘Around the kerosene lamp fell slow drops of dead butterflies.’

Swimming Underwater

Merethe Lindstrøm

‘When I picture my childhood, it’s like I’m swimming underwater.’ Merethe Lindstrøm’s story is translated from the Norwegian by Marta Eidsvåg, and is the winner of Harvill Secker’s Young Translators’ Prize 2016.