Heartbreaking, masterful...Astonishing compassion and restraint... Fitzgeraldesque."

This collection appeared on Radio 4, won the Rubery Prize, was a contender for the Edgehill Prize, and includes stories which have won, or been shortlisted for: The Asham, The London Magazine Short Story Prize, The Telegraph Short Story Prize, The Bristol, The Fish, The Write Idea Prize, The Glass Woman Prize, The Royal Academy Pin Drop Award, The Prolitzer Prize and The Rubery Prize.) You can listen to a clip on Radio 4 here.

Llama Sutra

Melanie Whipman

Melanie Whipman's bold debut collection is remarkable for its range, emotional force and dark humour. In these beautifully crafted tales of escapism and rebellion the surreal flickers around the margins of the everyday. Ordinary events tip over into misfortune, violence and despair. The collection offers a series of unsettling portraits of the lost, the young, the marginalised at their most vulnerable. These sharply imagined tales merge the grotesque and the tragic with humour and poignancy, evoking life's diversity and unpredictability with style and control.

​Limited edition hardcover available £18.99 from Waterstones, The Brick Lane Book Shop & The Haslemere Book Shop. Kindle (currently on offer for only £2.99 summer hols 2023) available from Amazon or order your signed hardcover copy here for £15 plus £1.99 postage.

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Reviews

Sophie King (Best selling Author of The School Run, The Playgroup, The Au-Pair):  
Melanie Whipman has the gift of taking you by the hand and leading you into a world which is not what it seems. Dark mixes with light at unexpected moments. The ordinary is deftly and cleverly layered with the extraordinary. Wonderful, compulsive reading.

Leone Ross: (Author of Come Let Us Sing Anyway, This One Sky Day, All the Blood is Red, Orange Laughter)
Heartbreaking, masterful...Astonishing compassion and restraint... Fitzgeraldesque... Richly detailed, extremely intelligent, moves through a remarkable range of moods and emotions and themes. Her characterisation exhibits mastery: compassionate yet unsentimental, intellectually clever yet unashamedly emotive...such a beautiful eye for detail and such compassion for women.
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Bethan Roberts: (author of Mother Island, My Policeman, The Pools and The Good Plain Cook):
Melanie Whipman's characters seem familiar, at first, but then they turn around and surprise you, and you're hooked... Her writing is full of black humour, spot-on observations and zippy dialogue.

Alex Wheatle (MBE, Author of award winning Brixton Rock, East of Acre Lane, The Dirty South, Crongton Knights):
'Bold, passionate, suspenseful.'
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Jane Rusbridge (Author of The Devils Music, and Rook):
As tightly crafted as firecrackers, these are high energy stories with impact. I read the whole collection in one sitting.
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​​Iain Pattison (Author of best seller, Cracking the Short Story Market) :
Dark, disturbing, punchy and unnerving. The writing is crisp, dynamic and pared to the bone. Melanie Whipman’s stories weave a hypnotic spell of menace and anticipation that stick in the memory long after reading.

Rose Tremain:
The atmosphere of tragedy pervading an ordinary event on a summer's day is well established. Ending is surprising and unforeseen… strangely affecting… a moving piece.

Jaki McCarick  (Author of 'The Scattering' and 'Belfast Girls') 
Beautifully written – the sentences are taut and powerful; a timely and stunning piece of writing…
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Sussanah Rickards (Author of award winning Hot Kitchen Snow) 
Beautifully controlled language, a writer to watch.