Susannah Rickards

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Biographical note:  Susannah Rickards grew up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She read English at Oxford, trained for the theatre in Paris and then spent ten years in classical and improvisational theatre, touring the world with baskets of corsets and swords in ever-dodgier vehicles. She revelled in the quirkiness of touring – playing Hamlet at Regent’s Park vast Open air theatre one night and in the gallery shop on the Isle of Skye two nights later with cheerful quilts for sale in the background instead of battlements. Touring from the drought-stricken Kenyan/Somali borders to war-torn Beirut, throughout Europe and the UK she worked as an actress until she was cast in Northern stage’s production of Stars in the Morning Sky, co-directed by the magnificent Lev Dodin of the Maly Theatre in St Petersburg. He set the cast a task of writing a story about their character prior to their appearance on stage and she realised immediately she was in the wrong job. When the show ended, she moved to East London and studied writing with novelists Alison Fell and Kathy Page, funding winter writing by guiding American high school students round Europe in the summer months. The first story she wrote was shortlisted for the Ian St James Awards but she soon learned it’s not always that simple. Since then her short fiction and poetry have been published, anthologised, broadcast on radio and online in the UK, USA, Canada and on BBC World service, most recently in issues 4 & 5 of The Yellow Room, in The New Writer and Glasshouse books anthology of London stories, one from each borough, in 33:East. She’s picked up a number of local, national and international awards for her work including the Eastside Books New Writing Bursary and Commonwealth Broadcasting Short Story Prize. In January 2000 she was awarded a Hawthornden Writing Fellowship and was Writer-in-Residence at Middlesex University from 2000-2002. When her twin sons were born she moved from central London to a Surrey village and stopped writing for five years but returned to it in 2008, literally running home from dropping the boys on their first day at school, straight to the computer. In 2008 she won the Conan Doyle New Fiction Award. Recently she has been shortlisted for the Cinnamon New Novel Award, highly commended in the 2010 Society of Authors’ Olive Cooke Award and shortlisted for BBC Radio 4’s Opening Lines. Online she is a member of Write Words, the critical forum The Writers’ Round Table and blogs from time to time with Strictly Writing. She’s been married to writer and arts’ documentary maker Simon Cherry for fifteen years and they live with their twin sons and a swiftly expanding menagerie. After a lifetime in terraced housing she still gets a thrill spotting wild deer, green woodpeckers and parakeets from her kitchen window. She works part time as an events manager for a catering company and teaches creative writing locally. If she weren’t a writer she’d quite like to be Alfred Brendel because no-one plays Beethoven better than him, or Gerhardt Richter because he knows his paint. She’d like to report that her spare time is spent bagging Munroes and swimming in lakes as these are old passions, but an indecent amount of it is squandered having tickle tournaments with her kids, passing notes to her mates during village fete committee meetings and losing at Mah-jong solitaire.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717989
ISBN:  9781844717989
Author:  Susannah Rickards
Title:  Hot Kitchen Snow
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FNB
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-10
Extent:  128pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  In Hot Kitchen Snow, multiple award-winning author Susannah Rickards creates characters you care about from the first sentence. In these contemporary stories set in Britain and East Africa, no one is quite as they seem. The bad do good and the pious wreak havoc. Ultimately this book is about the restorative powers in life; about overcoming traumas with wit, forgiveness, acceptance and fruit.

Main description:  Typically we lie to each other four times a day and the commonest lie told is, ‘I’m fine.’ The characters in Hot Kitchen Snow go one step further: they lie to themselves.

This collection explores the gap between how others see us and how we see ourselves. Teenage Euan is guest of honour at a mystery funeral; teacher Joseph Mutabe gives up a lifetime’s morals to earn extra money for a new sofa by tutoring the children of a military dictator; door-to-door dog-food seller Greg sets out to find the girl whose life he once saved, to lessen his sense of failure.

The tiny everyday shifts and decisions that account for some of life’s biggest developments are charted here, often represented by an emblematically charged scrap from nature: In ‘Life Pirates’ a lecherous drunk steals a rare sapling for a suicidal woman; in ‘Mango’, an exotic fruit reunites a family after near-lethal electric shock; a fall of snow from a skylight reminds a city banker of everything he lacks in ‘Hot Kitchen Snow’, and in ‘Odissi Dancing’, scarlet chrysanthemums sewn into a fat college administrator’s hair by her affectionate pupils assure her of what she never knew she had. Here the bad do good and the pious wreak havoc. No one is as they seem or as they think they are.

Ultimately, Hot Kitchen Snow is a collection about the restorative powers in life, about warmth, forgiveness and acceptance.

Table of contents:
Beau de l’Air
Mango
Hot Kitchen Snow
Guava Heads
The Dust Volcano
The Last of Her
Blizzards
Dog in The Yard
The Paperback Macbeth
Odissi Dancing
Ultimate Satisfaction Everyday
Things Like Meat
Moleman
The Tenth Mother
The Piano Thrower
Two Minutes
Mudlarks
Life Pirates

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Excerpt from book:  

Beau de l’Air

One morning, among his dad’s bills and his mam’s prize draw notifications, there was a letter for Euan. He stood in the sunny hallway, in his school shirt and underpants, and opened it. A black-edged card inside announced the funeral of a Tracey Marie Alleyn, next day at 3pm, with refreshments afterwards at 27 Crewdson Drive, Collingwood Park. Underneath a message had been added by hand: it would mean the world to us all if you could come.

He examined the writing to see if he recognised it but he didn’t. Boxy letters in blue biro, a style he associated with his nan, with elderly women who never ventured opinions. Nice touch. He was pretty certain there was no such person as Tracey Marie Alleyn. He’d never heard of her. This was some scam set up by Ritchie and Jason to scupper his first proper date with Helen. Euphoria had made him stupid. He should never have told them she’d agreed to go out with him.

‘Les Enfants du Paradis. It’s, like, a special screening,’ he’d told her, ‘at the Literary and Philosophical Society.’ He hoped the name of the venue would impress her. It impressed him. But she just said,’ Yeah, I know the Lit and Phil. My dad lectures there sometimes.’

‘It’s got subtitles.’

‘Mmm, that’ll be fun.’

She always sounded like she’d just swallowed ice cream. He never knew if she was taking the piss. She had this way of looking at him the same way she looked at puppies wriggling on their backs in the park.

‘OK,’ she said. Then, like she was quoting from an American teen movie: ‘Pick me up Tuesday, school gates, at four.’

In the kitchen his dad was up to his usual tricks, cutting all references to the Royals out of the morning paper so their smug-arse faces wouldn’t spoil his breakfast read. His mam was buttering toast for herself, but as soon as Euan walked in she offered it to him instead. She was too subservient. He’d tried telling her.

He still had the post in his hand. On the off-chance, he asked them: ‘Do you know a family called Alleyn, Collingwood Park Estate?’ His dad worked at the Leam’s cigarette factory just past Collingwood Park. Maybe it was possible someone had got the name wrong and it was meant for him. Three of his dad’s mates at Leam’s had died of emphysema only last year. But his dad shook his head, saying, ‘Yer gin-soaked old sow,’ as he shredded the Queen Mum’s gummy grin onto his growing pile of off-cuts.

‘You coming to this Goth gig at the crematorium the morrow?’ Euan asked Jason as they hiked the steep shortcut up the bluebell bank on the school side of the Dene.

‘What?’ said Jason.

‘Cool invite, like it’s for a funeral. Think it’s a gig or summat?’ He waved the invitation at Jason who took it and stared, shaking his head.

‘Tracey Marie? Nah, never heard of her.’

Euan glanced at him. He could just picture Jason and Ritchie ambushing him from behind a gravestone, water-pistols loaded with Concorde wine, chanting, ‘Suck-errr,’ at him for standing Helen up over their phoney invite. But it didn’t look like Jason was bluffing. Master of the deadpan voice he might be, but when Jason lied his eyes always squinted. They were dead straight now, concentrating on keeping his balance. The climb was making Jason wheeze. He preferred the bus but Euan enjoyed forcing him to walk occasionally. Jason needed trimming.

Not Jay and Ritchie then, but something was up. As he was walking through the lower school this gaggle of girls jostled past him and he heard them whispering, ‘Euan’ and, ‘Tracey Marie.’ They kept turning back to stare at him, giggling nervously, but when he called out, ‘Oi, yous lot, come here. What you saying?’ they scarpered. Then Don Bird, Head of Studies, caught Euan as he came out of assembly and whispered, ‘A word in my office at twelve, Nielson. Good lad.’ Bird was always a tad theatrical, but he’d looked at Euan with such concern, dipped his voice so gently and gravely that a lump had formed in Euan’s chest. What had he done? What was wrong?

It was a pisser. He’d planned to meet Helen at lunchtime, so he could intervene if she tried to change her mind about their date tomorrow, but she’d be in orchestra practise by the time he got clear of Bird. He’d told her he wanted her to look over his latest essay on L’Etranger. God, he loved watching her read his stuff. Loved how she sprawled on her stomach on the school field, her breasts almost touching the pages he’d written, kicking her legs up in irritation when she disagreed with what he’d put, so her skirt worked its way above her knees. He loved how her hair fell over her face, glittering dark and giving off a smell of almonds, and how, when he tried to nuzzle her, pretending he was just reading over her shoulder, she swatted him away like a fly. Like his ideas were too important, too absorbing to be distracted from. And then she’d attack those ideas one by one with her slow, assured voice. She liked a good intellectual slanging match. There weren’t enough lasses with brains but he’d found her. Helen pulling books off the shelves in her parents’ cavernous house, in vigorous pursuit of some John Donne quote, was the image he sent himself to sleep with every night, and he’d decided months ago he was going to glue himself to her till she got bored of fending him off and said yes. Part of him even sort of loved that she made him wait, though he’d had to keep convincing himself she was keen underneath, that she’d give in soon. And now she had. But he’d not get to Helen this lunchtime. Don Bird’s summons sat like a cold pebble in his stomach all morning, making him wonder.

Unpublished endorsement:  Susannah Rickards conjures with the peculiar truths of different human lives, and creates stories which are wry, compassionate, moving and often very funny.

Emma Darwin, author of Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy

Unpublished endorsement:  This book will entertain, provoke, shock and surprise you in all the ways a great short story collection should.

Tania Hershman