Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose the books they have most enjoyed this year. John Lavin Twenty years in the making, Sarah Hall’s seventh novel, Helm, is an imaginative tour de force. The Eden Valley, where the author grew up, is dominated by the shrieking Helm (the only named wind in Britain) and Hall…
The Lonely Crowd will feature a new short story by a different author each month throughout the remainder of 2025. For September, we are delighted to publish a new piece by Penny Simpson.
Blood pooled in the palm of her outstretched hand and a single red tear rolled down her wrist. Truth be known, it turned his stomach. She had been crying and her knickers were on the bathroom floor.
The Lonely Crowd will feature a new short story by a different author each month throughout the remainder of 2025. For July, we are delighted to publish a new work by Tadgh Muller. And the dog started barking, charging around like she might rip down a curtain or knock over the table. My missus went…
‘Mature People’ comes from my recently published collection of short stories, Twenty-Twenty Vision. It could well have been the title of the entire collection since the overarching theme is the experience of late middle-age reckoning; the backward glance on life, love and the whole damned thing.
Some of the action of ‘Mature People’ takes place in Trinity College Dublin – so there’s also a sly echo of Sally Rooney’s Normal People in the title. However, this is Normal People for oldies.
‘Take Away’ is about a Hannah, a fifteen-year-old struggling with ME in small town Sussex in 1990. It’s a personal story, as I was ill with ME in my mid-twenties during the same period. Hannah suffers disbelief and hostility about her illness, sometimes from classmates, but mostly from some care professionals, doctors and social workers.
Lucie McKnight Hardy (she/her) is the author of the novel Water Shall Refuse Them (2019) and a collection of short stories, Dead Relatives (2021), of which the Guardian said, ‘This short story collection confirms the author’s reputation in the field of literary horror.’ Her stories have featured in various publications in addition to The Lonely Crowd, including Best British Short Stories 2019, Uncertainties IV, The New Abject, Black Static and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press.
Her next novel, Night Babies, will be published by John Murray in Spring 2026.
Gavin Goodwin reads his short story, ‘The Fox’, accompanied by Nerys Clark on cello. The Lonely Crowd · ‘The Fox’ by Gavin Goodwin Gavin Goodwin lectures in English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. His most recent publication is Creativity and Anxiety: Making, Meaning, Experience (Palgrave, 2023). ‘The Fox’ was written and performed by Gavin…
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick their favourite books of 2024. John Lavin The Letters of Seamus Heaney (edited by Christopher Reid) is surely an important book, giving the reader a more unfettered insight into the mind of the great poet than the equally essential Stepping Stones (Heaney’s autobiography-by-interview with Dennis O’Driscoll). Immediately the lapsed Heaney…
She remembered filing out of the workshop in a daze. Condemned by a jury of her peers. Jamie and Marcella asked her to come for a drink as if nothing had happened but she couldn’t face it. She felt as she had the first day. Innocent and enormously foolish. She didn’t belong here; she never had. It wasn’t that she hadn’t the brains; it was that her ambition wasn’t high-brow enough. Years of dulling necessary work had knocked that out of her. Life and single mothering and bad TV had thinned her emotions. The bad poetry of her youth at least had had heart.
I don’t bother going home to change after my last exam, even though it’s only three o’clock and the pub will be empty. In Carty’s you’ll get served in school uniform, as long as you take off your tie and blazer before approaching the bar.A lonely pint will be the perfect first drink; just me,…
I climb the stile and drop into the field, feet sending a dust cloud into the air. It films my eyes and I blink it away as best I can. The sheep are bloated yellow dots under the crumbling boundary wall, awake but still, conserving energy before their move to the next patch of shade.…
…slap at thrip and thunderbug, midge & mosquito come whining from the dark at neck and wrist, ancient blood knowledge voiced by this time & in this place long before the winking out of every point of light & too the ones unseeable, inaudible, stars so far that they are yet to be even seen here so young is the planet in relation, how it will go with the one to whom you are wed Mary well ask the biting bloodbugs, ask the twirling phantoms hereabouts & implore the leaves & the shine on them & if you must grieve at this point before death then
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose their Books of the Year…