New Books! Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips

If there was a machine that could tell you the exact date that you’d die – would you use it? Would you tell your spouse what it said? What effect might it have on your marriage? That’s just one of the premises in Helen Phillips’ new short story collection Some Possible Solutions. In another, time freezes at a dinner party and a woman decides to kiss her friend’s husband. A young woman suddenly finds her love for her parents tested when she stops being able to see people’s skin. Her mother’s embraces seem far less welcoming once she can see her muscles, blood vessels and eye balls. A young mother starts to see her doppelgänger all over town. Intrigued? I hope you are because this is a great collection! Phillips stories feature science-fiction and dystopian futures but they’re also tales about marriage, friendship and family.

I don’t know if this was some sort of issue with my digital galley or not, but some later parts of the book were streams of consciousness and it was difficult to understand what was going on. It might be that my copy was corrupted in some way but I’m not sure.  It didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the book, anyway. Phillips writing is wonderfully creative and weird. She really tests boundaries and I found that I read this collection rather quickly. If you want to have a taster of her work, she has several free short stories on her website.

Some Possible Solutions is published in the UK on the 13th of June.

Disclaimer – I received a digital galley of Some Possible Solutions in return for an honest review.