True North

About

Princesses who never wanted to be rescued... debutantes who are unwilling to keep quiet about politics just to preserve their marriage prospects... fairy tale characters who question key motivations in their own, now-famous stories... The protagonists of Sara Maitland’s remarkable short fiction all seem to be bursting at the seams of their own characterisation, challenging our understanding of age-old narratives, and showing even the fundamentals of storytelling to be fluid, malleable and unreliable.

Spanning over 40 years of writing, Sara Maitland’s Selected Stories brings together highlights from a phenomenal career in short fiction. Traditional folk stories, myths and fairy tales are expertly interrogated, modernised and given feminist and scientific re-readings. Drawing from classical, Norse, Inuit and other pagan mythologies, these stories find folkloric archetypes alive and well in every conceivable modern context. Formally innovative, emotionally edgy and deeply imbued with a sense of landscape, they speak to our abiding concerns about humanity’s relationship with the natural world, and the past’s uncanny ability to creep into our present and re-shape it, according to its own needs.

Press

‘Sara Maitland is a visionary writer and thinker. She has been ahead of her time, then she has defined it, then she has struck out way beyond it. Few writers in our language have used a burning intelligence so fearlessly.’ — Max Porter, Grief is a Thing with Feathers

‘Writer, thinker, seeker, seer, Sara Maitland is one of our most articulate and probing intellects, with an enervating ability to look closely at things and make us look with her.‘ — Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

‘Sara Maitland’s stories thrum with a kind of primal power. Reaching back into history, folklore and myth, she uncovers the layers of belief and superstition that form the weave of her characters’ lives.’– Wyl Menmuir, The Draw of the Sea

‘I've never read anyone like Sara - her work is like a rope threaded from spirituality, eye-watering intelligence, imagination and a profound understanding of humanity.’ — Shaun Bythell, author of Diary of a Bookseller

''A profound and significant collection... a formidable author… very, very good indeed.'  — The Scotsman

'Things are never as they initially seem in Maitland’s meticulously imagined worlds: the happiest result is that, occasionally, they turn out to be just what we would wish for.' - TLS 

‘Maitland’s stories hum with a continuous glow, drawn from across different collections, different times, different places; they nevertheless convey that solid sense of simultaneous wonder and groundedness that has come to typify the magical realist genre.’ — Manchester Review of Books

‘This is a fine collection, a treasure trove of philosophical conjecture, striking imagery, beautifully contrived ambiguity and, best of all, luminous insights into the complexities of being human.’ - Morning Star