Sue Hubbard's New Collection of Short Stories

Sue Hubbard’s new collection of short stories unites the theme of painting and the lives of women, with tales of fear, failure, love and desire.

Rothko’s Red is a collection of ten stories, subtly linked by painting and art, about the lives of women: their hopes, fears, failures and challenges. They reveal the choices and destinies of a number of characters from very differing backgrounds, embracing the harsh realities of desire, loss and ageing. Powerful, yet tender, psychologically intricate and emotionally perceptive, these fearless stories examine the complex lives of modern women. Substantial, moving and beautifully written they call upon both Sue Hubbard’s wide ranging knowledge of and feel for art, as well as her skill as a poet.

“The ten stories in this dazzling collection share a connection - sometimes direct and sometimes oblique - to a painter or painting, ranging from Goya to Rothko, from Bernini to Jackson Pollock. Sue Hubbard is an art critic as well as a fine poet, and her understanding of human motivation is as highly developed as her feeling for language and art. She writes with perception and sensitivity about contemporary English women, and about the men who give them so much pleasure and pain.”
—Ruth Fainlight

“Compelling and authentic, Sue Hubbard’s stories have the unmistakable feel of reality. Bleak, yet always tinged with love, the reality comes from the joining of distinct skills: the artist’s eye and talent for composition, and the poet’s touch, with imagery which is never laboured but always the perfect expression of a story’s theme. Not a word or picture is out of place.”
—Bernard O’Donoghue

Read an extract

Goya’s Dark

The light is fading as the evening draws in across the banana plantation. It laps round the walls of the Marimanti Rural Methodist Centre where she is the only guest like the incoming tide. Down the long hallway she can hear the tinny amplification of the TV at full volume where the caretaker is taking advantage of the single hour of electricity, provided by the ineffectual generator, before they are plunged into complete darkness. He is sitting in his vest, his dark skin covered with beads of sweat; his dusty feet up on a white plastic chair in the middle of the large room that is used for Bible conferences. Swatting flies and swigging beer from the neck of a bottle he scratches his groin as he watches the election rally, which flickers in the corner on the black and white set that’s normally covered by a lace nylon cloth.

She doesn’t much like him. There is something insolent and over familiar about his manner; quite different to all the other Kenyans she has met. The other evening he had walked into her room without knocking as she was standing wrapped in nothing but a towel, to tell her to stop using her hairdryer.

‘Makes TV picture go,’ he had said without apology.

The sound of the set bounces off the lino floors and metal window frames, echoing through the empty rooms of the long concrete bungalow that’s the only substantial building for miles amid the scattering of wooden shacks and mud huts with their corrugated tin roofs. She can hear the voice of the opposition leader Raila Odinga haranguing President Mwai Kibaki. There are still months to go before the election, but her heart sinks every time she hears the obvious barefaced lies about bringing electricity, roads and secondary education to all the people of Kenya. For ever since she has been here she’s watched the women trudging in the heat backwards and forwards from the river with oil drums of untreated water strapped to their backs and the barefoot children in patched uniforms trailing the five miles to school in the early morning along unmade roads.

She looks out of the window and sees a young boy in a torn T-shirt, grubby shorts and battered flip flops making his way home in the fading light over the dusty fields with a bundle of firewood. The fields are cracked and dry as the soles of his feet and he is caked in red dust.

She gets up and gathers her torch, her mobile phone and glasses and places them under the mosquito net next to her pillow. Her room is clean but spare. There is a desk, on which there is a copy of the Gideon Bible in fake green leather, and two beds covered in incongruous pale blue flowered satin bedspreads ruched with pink nylon, the sort of cheap decorations that she images you might find in a brothel. Hanging above each is a blue mosquito net. She searches for some matches and melts the stub of a thin candle onto a chipped saucer so that she will be prepared when the lights suddenly go out. That has been the hardest part, the dark. When she’d arrived here in the charity land rover from Nairobi all she had been able to see was a huddle of shacks and groups of shadowy figures lit by the occasional paraffin lantern.

About the author

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and art critic. She has published two collections of poetry /Everything Begins with the Skin/ (Enitharmon)/ /and /Ghost Station/ (Salt)/ /and a number of her poems appeared in /Oxford// Poets 2000/ (Carcanet.) Her first novel /Depth of Field /was published by Dewi Lewis. A regular art critic for /The Independent/ and /The New Statesman,/ she was twice winner of the London Writers’ Competition and has won third prize in the National and the Blackwell’s/ Times Literary Supplement Competition. As the Poetry Society’s Public Art Poet she was commissioned to produce London’s largest public art poem at Waterloo. Recently the recipient of a major Arts Council award she lives and works in London.

ISBN 978-1-84471-444-5 Publication date: 15 September 2008 Short Stories B format (198 × 129 mm) Trade Hardback 160 pp £12.99 RRP Gallery tie in and launch Rothko exhibition tie in Guerilla marketing campaign Review coverage Web promotion Facebook and MySpace profiles A2 and A3 posters, postcards, bookmarks available now Contact Chris or Jen on 01223 882220 Email sales@saltpublishing.com

Available on full trade terms from Gardners Books 1 Whittle Drive Eastbourne East Sussex BN23 6QH United Kingdom Phone: 01323 521777 Fax: 01323 521666 Bertram Group Ltd 1 Broadland Business Park Norwich NR7 0WF United Kingdom Freephone: 0800 333344 Freephone fax: 0800 585686 (UK only)

	Sue Hubbard Rothko’s Red and Other Stories Hardback Rothko’s Red is a collection of ten stories, subtly linked by painting and art, about the lives of women: their hopes, fears, failures and challenges. They reveal the choices and destinies of characters from various backgrounds, embracing the harsh realities of desire, loss and ageing. Learn more.