Hitting Trees with Sticks
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**Short-listed for the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize**
A young textile designer quits Britain to work for a Nigerian women’s refuge, confident that this is her one chance to make a difference…
A sixteen-year-old uses his first job, as a window-cleaner, to peer into other people’s lives and carefully plan his own…
A leading scientist spends an evening trying to explain his latest theory to a man who could destroy him...
The characters in Jane Rogers’ first short story collection are each blessed with an unwavering conviction. Buoyed up on self-belief, they enthuse, take calculated risks, and refuse to be deterred by the odds stacked against them. But just as Rogers’ compassion as a writer endears us to their cause, her keen eye shows how fine the balance can be between conviction and self-delusion. At times, her subject seems to be the fallibility of any point of view, the persistence of blind spots no matter how careful or intelligent the viewer. Hers are not unreliable narrators, merely human ones – diverse, contradictory, imperfect. Indeed it is often their flaws that beguile us.
‘There is nothing predictable about a Jane Rogers story. She has the confidence and skill to inhabit many different voices and different worlds. She slides the reader, in imagination, to a snow-bound France, to Africa, to the Caribbean: she takes us into offices and libraries, under the sea and into the forest, and also into the vast untrodden country of memory that we carry around inside. Her observation of our species is tender, precise, illuminating.’ – Hilary Mantel
'Thrilling, ambitious stories that cross continents and soar from cells to stars.' – Maggie Gee
‘Warm, wise, insightful, sharply observed and beautifully written – each story is a world in microcosm.’ – Marina Lewycka
'This is her first collection of short stories, and it is beautiful.' - The Independent on Sunday
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Jane Rogers was born in London in 1952 and lived in Birmingham, New York State (Grand Island) and Oxford, before doing an English degree at Cambridge University. She taught English for 6 years before the publication of her first novel, Separate Tracks. Since then she has written eight novels including Mr Wroe's Virgins, Island, The Voyage Home and most recentlyThe Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press), as well as original and adapted work for television and radio drama. In 1994 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is currently Professor of Writing on the MA course at Sheffield Hallam University.
She lives near Manchester with her partner and two children. In 2009 her story 'Hitting Trees With Sticks' was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Prize. In 2011 her novel The Testament of Jessie Lamb was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
