Name: Unaccustomed to Grace
ISBN: 9781952224164

Lesley Bannatyne

Debut short fiction collection. Runner-up for the 2021 Acacia Fiction Prize

Unaccustomed to Grace

Seher Mohsin

Unaccustomed to Grace is a collection of short stories by Lesley Bannatyne. It published earlier this year in February by Kallisto Gaia Press! At 172 pages, it’s a short read, but with each word carefully chosen you don’t feel like you’re missing anything!

Unaccustomed to Grace is a collection of short stories, each with a different character. When I first started reading the book it was hard for me to see how the title, Unaccustomed to Grace, tied into the stories. After a while, that became clearer.

The characters in the book read as people who have things done to them, instead of taking action themselves, whether they are parents, a pregnant teen, a nurse trying to make friends, or the teenage boy breaking into a house with his buddy. I thought that a moment of action defined these characters, but stories like Corpse walks into a bar, Gravity, Waiting for Ivy, On Tuesday I will kill him, Summerland, and The boy in the boat all make it clear that while the art of letting go, contrary to whatever Elizabeth Bishop says, is fairly hard to master, but it’s only in its practice that these characters can achieve, not peace, but a moment of grace.

While Lesley Bannatyne is known as the ‘Queen of Halloween’, that doesn’t play a huge role in the book. However, it’s easy to think we’ll get something more centred on that day when the opening story is Corpse Walks into a Bar. Despite the presence of the darker side of human nature, I feel as though the characters in these stories, as complicated as they are in their own ways, are fundamentally good. And it’s this assumption of goodness, of grace, that Lesley Bannatyne wants you to take home.

Unaccustomed to Grace

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