Publisher's Synopsis
'The Dressing-Up Box does the deepest work of fiction - it tells us strange, hard, beautiful truths for our time. Constantine offers a quietly furious and moving collection packed with undefended children and lost adults, personalities grown eccentric under stress and raging for mercy. Nightmares shift, blood flows in rivers and humanity responds with strange mercy, humour and a desperate appetite for love.' - A. L. Kennedy
The stories in David Constantine's fifth collection all orbit around a moment of personal crisis, a pressure point where the weight of the past or the present becomes unbearable. These crises may be brought on by a bereavement, a personal failure or trauma, or a crisis of identity. But in all cases, what's at stake is a life worth living.
Against the backdrop of war, a group of children barricade themselves in an abandoned townhouse, cherishing what’s left of their innocence with the help of a dressing-up box...
A deep-sea diver takes to being suspended for hours at a time on the end of a line not long enough to reach the seabed...
An aging widower moves into the shed at the end of his garden to plan out his ‘endgame’ surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of hoarded curiosities...
The characters in David Constantine’s fifth collection are all in pursuit of sanctuary; the violence and mendacity of the outside world presses in from all sides – be it the ritualised brutality suffered by children at a Catholic orphanage, or the harrowing videos shared among refugees of an atrocity ‘back home’. In each case, the characters withdraw into themselves, sometimes abandoning language altogether, until something breaks and they can retreat no further. In Constantine’s luminous prose, these stories capture such moments in all their clarity; moments when an entire life seems to hang in the balance, the past’s betrayals exposed, its ghosts dragged out into the daylight; moments in which the possibility of defiance and redemption is everything.
