When Sara meets an Afghani refugee separated from his beloved wife and family, she decides to try to repair relations with Helena – but when a lie told by her grandmother years before begins to unravel, a darker truth than she could ever imagine is revealed. Now, estranged not only from her mother but also from her husband, Sara raises her daughter, Ellie, with a central wish to spare her the same feeling of abandonment that she experienced as a child. Sara, a geneticist, also longs to know the identity of her father, and Helena won’t tell her. Sara’s grandmother, Nina Barsova, a Russian post-war immigrant, lovingly raised Sara in the cottage at the foot of Mt Wellington but without ever explaining why Sara’s own mother, Helena, abandoned her as a baby. When Sara Rose returns to live in her recently deceased grandmother’s Tasmanian cottage, her past and that of her mother and grandmother are ever-present.
This entry was posted in Blog on Maby Penny Jones.The award-winning author of The Better Son is back with Matryoshka – a beautifully written and haunting tale of family, secrets, violence, and refuge, set against the breathtaking backdrop of Tasmania. On the plus side a quick rejection does mean that you can get that story ready to be submitted once again. For me that waiting is the hardest bit of the writing process, though that rejection smarts when it pings into your inbox (I scored bonus points last year for shortest time before a rejection when a short story was rejected in 2 minutes). Of the remaining stories (and some that I completed in 2019) I submitted them 25 times: I have so far received 17 rejections (In addition to my own I also received two for someone called Jenny, please give her my condolences, and one for a completely different author who had subbed to the same anthology), 3 acceptances, 1 invite that is still pending final acceptance, and there are still 4 open submissions I am waiting to hear back from. The novella Matryoshka I am happy to say is being published by Hersham Horror on April 21st, and the poem was published as part of the Sinister Horror company’s Christmas Advent Calender. In 2020 I managed to write a novella, 10 short stories and a poem. Last year I was thrilled to be nominated for the BFS 2020 Best Newcomer Award for my collection Suffer Little Children, and also to have my short story Dendrochronolgy nominated for Best Short Story, and although I didn’t win, I was awarded this wonderful “Making up Words with Friends” trophy for my prowess at on-line scrabble by my fellow nominee (and dual award winner) Laura Mauro. It has been an odd 12 months (for everyone and everything, not just for my writing), there have been both highs and lows in my writing since I last up dated my website.
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