Author(s): Wendy Erskine

Short Stories | Ireland

'I could not put this book down and loved every page.' - Salena Godden

'Humane, funny, surprising, profound.' - Chris Power

'A masterpiece.' - David Keenan

Meet Drew Lord Haig, called upon to sing the obscure hit from his youth at a paramilitary event. Or Max, who recalls an eventful journey to a Christian film festival. Meet Mrs Dallesandro, in the tanning salon on her wedding anniversary dreaming of a teenage sexual experience. And Sonya, who scours the streets of Belfast for the missing posters of her dead son.

In Dance Move, the new collection of stories from Wendy Erskine, we meet characters who are looking to wrest control of their lives, only to find themselves defined by the moment in their past that marked them.

In these stories - as in real life - the funny, the tender and the devastating go hand in hand. Full of warmth, the familiar and the strange, they are about what it means to live in the world, how far you can end up from where you came from, and what it means to look back.

Dance Move is a triumph, each story so perfectly formed, each character vividly set and startling. I could not put this book down and loved every page. Wendy Erskine is a profound and ingenious story teller, a magnificent writer of the highest calibre. -- Salena Godden
Erskine's stories open slight, but they contain more than it seems possible for short stories to contain. Their warmth and depth - even in their depictions of lives that are cold, or shallow, or hopelessly adrift - is testament not only to Erskine's unparalleled skill as a writer of short stories, but also to her humanity. Her characters are astonishingly alive. They rise off the pages of Dance Move and they lodge in the heart, and stay there. -- Keith Ridgway
There are few short story writers I look forward to reading as much as Wendy Erskine. Humane, funny, surprising, profound; in Dance Move she does it all. -- Chris Power
Daring, funny, heartbreaking . . . not to be missed * Observer *
So funny and so moving. Erskine's writing is like gentle razor blades, carving blissfully through to the real. -- Ruby Cowling
Dance Move is the most consummate book of short stories I know. -- Tom Conaghan * Irish Times *
No one is writing better stories than Wendy Erskine. -- John Mitchinson
I wondered if Dance Move . . . could possibly surpass Erskine's debut Sweet Home. It does. -- Matt Rowland Hill, author of Original Sins: A Memoir
Wendy Erskine is like Vermeer, I think. In the same way that supposedly ordinary people and places are illuminated by Vermeer in a way that is technically flawless, but also imbued with something extra that can't be extracted from the whole. I do think it is genius really, in the both of them. -- Ben Pester, author of Am I In The Right Place?
Wendy Erskine's debut, Sweet Home, was pitch perfect . . . Dance Move is equally brilliant; set in Belfast and brimful of well drawn, compelling characters, these spare, spacious stories pack an emotional punch * Daily Mail *
Erskine's pitch is close to perfect, and as a chronicler of the human condition, she has the most penetrating gaze. * iNews *
If there's a sharper, brighter, truer, funnier, more compelling, more intensely and rewardingly attentive storyteller around I'd like to know who. -- David Hayden
Exhilarating . . . a vivacious sweep of characters . . . the turn of events ingenious . . . * Irish Times *
A remarkable revelation of the everyday extraordinary. Erskine has shown us how the banal can also be epic in its compassion and understated raw beauty. This is a book that carries with it a quiet joy, a reminder of the intensity of life, even at its most quotidian. * Totally Dublin *
Superb * Hot Press *

Author Biography: Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published by Repeater, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Faber & Faber, Tangerine Press, No Alibis Press and Rough Trade Books. Sweet Home, her first collection of stories, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. It was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and won the 2020 Butler Literary Award.