Vanessa Gebbie

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Biographical note:  Vanessa Gebbie is the daughter of a student nurse and a travelling salesman and was given up for adoption at birth. She spent much of her childhood in Wales and can still sing hymns and swear in Welsh. Her short fiction has won many awards including Fish and Bridport prizes and has been published in the UK, USA, New Zealand, Canada and India, translated into Vietnamese and Italian and broadcast by the BBC. Her teaching and facilitating has led to the publishing of anthologies of work by both the homeless and refugees in her home city of Brighton and Hove, Sussex, UK. Her novel in progress won a first prize in the 2007 Daily Telegraph Novel Competition.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718122
ISBN:  9781844718122
Author:  Vanessa Gebbie
Title:  Storm Warning
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:  112pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  168 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:  Storm Warning explores the echoes and aftershocks of human conflict in a series of powerful stories in which the characters are tested, sometimes to breaking point. Gebbie pulls no punches, exploring the after-effects of atrocity and sometimes, the seeds of atrocity itself.

Main description:  Haunting, sometimes shocking, always thought-provoking. Storm Warning is the latest collection from award-winning writer Vanessa Gebbie, a writer described as ‘prodigiously gifted’ by novelist Maggie Gee.

Storm Warning explores the echoes of human conflict in a series of powerful stories and flashes inspired by life with the author’s own father, an ordinary and gentle man who fought and was decorated in WWII, but who suffered the after-effects for the rest of his life.

The conflicts range from conventional warfare through violent tribal clashes to historical religious persecution. Gebbie’s viewpoints are never predictable. War veterans are haunted by events that echo louder and louder, and eventually break them, or they struggle to maintain normal relationships. A prisoner sees the violent execution of a friend and mentor, a boy hides from a necklacing, a young student escapes the fighting in Iraq in the hope of continuing his education in the West and a woman tells what she knows of her parents’ torture.

Echoes of conflict are often explored from the child’s perspective. A young girl witnesses an attempted escape over the Berlin Wall. Another is present when her grandfather, a writer, is targeted by the Russian Cultural Revolution, and two small boys are unwilling bystanders to atrocities in African inter-tribal conflicts.

The people in these stories are not those who go down in history. They are the ordinary troops. They are the powerless, caught up involuntarily. All are tested, sometimes to breaking point, in this extraordinary collection as Gebbie pulls no punches, exploring the surreality of conflict, the after-effects of atrocity and sometimes, the seeds of atrocity itself.

Table of contents:
The Return of the Baker, Edwin Tregear
Storm Warning
Gas Gangrene
Road Kill
Cello Strings and Screeching Metal
Confession to a Drowned Dog
The Wig Maker
Maiba’s Ribbon
Letters from Kilburn
The Salt Box
Wei Ch-i
Background Noise
Red Sandals
Large Capacity, Severe Abuse
The Ale-Heretic
On the Beach
Talking to Golda
Lay By
Shibuya Intersection
The Strong Mind of Musa B’Bele

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Excerpt from book:  

The Salt Box



The day the men came, Mama burned the soup and had to make it all over again. Grandpa’s leg was bad; he hadn’t got up from the mattress in the kitchen for a long time. He didn’t speak much in those days, but he was writing a lot. Mama said he shouldn’t write because it was dangerous, but he shrugged and winked at me. His leg smelled awful, but that day the smell of burning soup covered it up.

Mama said, ‘Valya, chop four beets. Tear the cabbages with your hands. Peel five potatoes. Carrots. Onions. Are there any left?’

She put more water on to boil. She opened the wooden salt box and threw a few pinches into the pan. The salt came right to the top of the box because it was Grandpa’s secret place. He wrote diaries, articles, poems, letters, which he never posted, and when I asked who they were for he said they were for me, for my friends, for all free people. He wrote on thin paper in tiny writing, and Mama took the papers and buried them under the salt.

She buried some poems that morning, deep. Grandpa read them to me first. They were about men marching for freedom, and the heart being stronger than the arm that carries the sword, and youth being like young wheat standing tall in the fields. His words made me cry.

I got the biggest cabbages and tore them into pieces until it filled the pan, then I watched them turning red with beet juice.



Later, when the soup had been bubbling a good while, and when I was really hungry, Peter came in so fast the door banged against the wall.

‘Men!’

Mama’s face was red from the stove. She said, ‘Quick, come and sit,’ and she stirred and stirred the soup, tasted it, put in more salt. More salt. It smelled good. She tidied Grandpa and threw his pencil into the stove.

‘Quick, Valya. Say grace,’ she said. Grandpa put his head in his hands.

Three men came in. They brought a funny smell in with them. They ignored Mama, who went on stirring, and they spoke roughly to Grandpa.

‘Alexei Alexandrovich, the writer?’

‘I am Alexandrovich. Whether I am a writer is for others to say.’

Mama spoke then. ‘My father has not written for years,’ she said.

They laughed. ‘That is not what we are told.’

‘You are welcome to search,’ Mama said, ‘while I feed my family.’ She started ladling the soup, red and steaming, into bowls. She fetched half a loaf and tore it up on the table.

The men searched, starting with Grandpa’s mattress, and wrinkled their noses at his leg. Mama said, ‘Eat your food, children.’



The soup was good. But it felt different on my tongue. Maybe it hadn’t boiled quite long enough. Mama took a bowl to Grandpa and sat on the mattress. She started feeding him, big spoonfuls, pieces of beet and cabbage and onion. The soldiers laughed.

‘The great writer Alexei Alexandrovich, fed like a baby.’

But Mama said again, ‘My father has not written for years.’

The soldiers made such a noise turning the pans over.



I took a spoon of soup and put it in my mouth —and it wasn’t cabbage. It felt different in my mouth. When I took the next spoonful I waited to see the men weren’t watching me and I looked at it closely. I was right, it wasn’t cabbage. It was a small piece of paper, stained red with beet juice, and I could see tiny words on it, like spiders’ footsteps. I couldn’t read them. I looked at Grandpa. He smiled, but it was such a sad, sad smile. We went on eating. The men kept on searching. They even looked in the salt box. But the salt only came half way up the sides.

When they had gone, no one said anything. Mama was crying quietly. Peter hadn’t noticed anything. And Grandpa, the great Alexei Alexandrovich, lay back and closed his eyes.

Unpublished endorsement:  In these terse and complex fictions, Vanessa Gebbie gives us an entire worldview in only a few pages. Her carefully etched story-moments and sharp-edged prose style are only the least of her considerable storytelling gifts.

Rusty Barnes, Editor and Co-Founder, Night Train

Unpublished endorsement:  Vanessa Gebbie is a massively gifted writer. Her harrowing honesty pulls no punches.

Peter James, author of best-selling Roy Grace novels