Lucy Caldwell's 'Devotions' Praised as Frightening, Passionate
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- Lucy Caldwell's fourth story collection, Devotions, is published by Faber at £14.99 and continues her documented focus on family life, professional artistic life, and how characters manage memory, building on her earlier Multitudes, Intimacies, and Openings.
- "All Grown Up" follows 40-year-old divorcee Luke, who has a bad back, incipient alcoholism, and a child at boarding school, returning to his childhood home to sell it but being steadily reabsorbed as memories of divorce, his mother's death, and entrapment surface.
- "Hamlet, a Love Story" tracks playwright Sonya in a New York dive bar after the run of her play "Choose Your Own Hamlet," where she ends up with Callum and reflects on how choose-your-own-ending texts reward action over inaction — punishing those who fail to "seize the narrative."
- "The Lady of the House" is a ghost story set in a Scottish castle gatehouse with a 1660 curse, where two sisters — one addressed only as "you" — confront both a haunting presence and surfacing memories; Lou confesses the "most random things" resurfacing after seven years of IVF, miscarriages, and financial hardship.
- "Little Lands" pairs a shot-by-shot replay of the dance scene in The Sound of Music with the real-life story of Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews, who fell in love during filming and, the text says, "regretted never doing anything about it."
- "Harmony Hill" features a professional violinist traveling alone by air with an instrument "older than the United States of America," with Caldwell framing duty to talent and teachers as "obsession as stewardship."
- The reviewer praises Caldwell's "stimulating, frightening, quietly passionate and somehow comforting" realism — her sharpness of eye and capture of the moment — calling the collection best read "one at a time, with an attention that responds to the intention of the author."
Why it matters: Caldwell's fourth collection extends a continuous exploration of memory, duty, and the tension between action and inaction that the reviewer traces from her earlier Multitudes, Intimacies, and Openings; the emphasis on realism over plot signals how Faber is positioning this £14.99 literary short-fiction release for attentive, slow readers rather than the mass market.
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