Book review: A Snow Garden

WHEN Rachel Joyce writes a novel or a radio play, she often cuts out minor characters, or minimises their role.

These characters, she writes, in the Foreword of A Snow Garden, hang around her office, distracting her and making a racket. In order to clean them out, she decided to write a short story collection, giving each one a story of their own.

Maureen, the shy teenager who attends her first dance in ‘The Boxing Day Ball’, appeared briefly, in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; Binny, the hopeless mother of the first story, who shuts down her life rather than give in to grief, was cut from Joyce’s second novel, Perfect.