The Dressing-Up Box

The characters in David Constantines fifth collection are all in pursuit of sanctuary; the violence and mendacity of the outside world presses in from all sides be it the ritualised brutality suffered by children at a Catholic orphanage, or the harrowing videos shared among refugees of an atrocity back home. In each case, the characters withdraw into themselves, sometimes abandoning language altogether, until something breaks and they can retreat no further. In Constantines luminous prose, these stories capture such moments in all their clarity; moments when an entire life seems to hang in the balance, the pasts betrayals exposed, its ghosts dragged out into the daylight; moments in which the possibility of defiance and redemption is everything. See more