Month: November 2023

Book Review: ‘Seen through a glass of Red’ by Liz Cox

Seen Through a Glass of Red by Liz Cox

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I was immediately intrigued by the charming title. It promises slightly offbeat or surreal household or family dramas, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Characters, sympathetically drawn, wrestle with everything from a desire to spend a cosy Christmas alone, to a fraught night vigil following efforts to save the life of a son gored in a hunt (no spoilers).

In simple, sometimes even too pedestrian, prose, there are charmingly-drawn cafes with interesting meetings and conversations. There are feelings of belonging, but sometimes of quiet desire to ‘move on’. There are a lot of scarves. And nice shops.

And one, big, gut-wrench.

Some of the stories have the same sideways look at the otherwise-ordinary that I recall from David Sidaris’ ‘Dress your Family in Corduroy and Denim,’ but with a little more myth and ‘weird’.

The subtle weirdness of the collection is heightened by the number of anachronisms. You never know what decade you are in. A War Widow – we assume WWII, since her fiancé is mentioned as leaving for ‘the front’ – must be jumping out of bed and walking briskly to the park to buy croissants at nearly a hundred years of age. An encounter takes place in a train with compartments – I can’t remember the last time I saw one of those. There’s a restaurant kitchen whose young staff are devoid of phones with Google for urgently locating a recipe, and finally the eeriest of all: there’s the moon travelling the wrong way round the earth.

Is that last one deliberate? Given that in this particular tale an entire landscape has materialised and then just as mysteriously disappeared overnight, who knows?




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