Fairlight to publish debut short story collection from Lynda Clark

Oxford-based indie Fairlight Books has acquired world rights to Lynda Clark’s debut short story collection Dreaming in Quantum and Other Stories.

The collection will contain 16 stories featuring Clark's "darkly humorous" style, playing on themes of multiple realities and dystopian futures, says the publisher. 

The collection will feature the story "Ghillie’s Mum", which follows a shape-shifting mother who needs to decide whether to compromise and stay in her human form or lose her son. It was shortlisted for the 2019 BBC National Short Story Award and the 2020 ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award, and was a regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Europe and Canada.

Other stories in the collection include "My Invisible Wife", following a man who is learning how to live with a gradually disappearing wife; "Dreaming in Quantum", in which there is a murder to be solved with echoes through different dimensions only accessible in dreams; and "Blanks", about a world in which people are paying to create clones of themselves so that they will never die. 

Fairlight Books published Clark's debut novel, Beyond Kidding, in 2019.