Books like Not the End of the World

4★A favourite author, a favourite genre (short stories), and a theme I enjoy – recurring characters. I liked it but expected to like it more. I always enjoy her ingenuity and ideas and writing style. I think these could be fables for our time.I particularly liked the first and last stories, where two ingenuous girls wander through shops, dreaming aloud in detail about their perfect weddings one day while “the end of the world” is actually taking place around them. At first, it seems weird when they marvel at fabrics and such while noting that there is an alert for fire in the haberdashery department. Trudi begins to panic, as she smells smoke, but Charlene carries on imagining their future life: \ “ ‘Or we could lead an even simpler life,’ Charlene said hurriedly, ‘a life where there are no machines and where we would live on a green hillside and sleep under the stars and gather kindling in the woods. And we would keep animals-'‘What kind of animals?’ Trudi asked, as everything from taffeta to winceyette suddenly went up in flames.”\ The art of distraction to avert panic? They continue this inane conversation even as they make their escape. There is more to it than this, of course, but it certainly makes me think of the head-in-the-sand approach so many of us have toward the current state of our world. (We need coffee. What's in the fridge?)I always enjoy Atkinson’s writing:\ “her ankles like melting Brie above those bloody awful faux Birkenstocks”“The man was the color of newly poured concrete.”\ There’s birth, life, and death.\ “When he celebrated his fortieth birthday, Addison had neither child nor wife. When he celebrated his forty-first, he had both, one inside the other. Every morning when Addison woke up, he was surprised anew by these two facts.”\ A different wife:\ “Romney had opted to be knocked unconscious and split open rather than give birth naturally. Missy favoured natural childbirth whenever possible. She thought it was character forming for a child to have to fight its way into existence. Missy herself was a twin and had made sure she’d elbowed her way out first, ahead of her brother.”\ Parents will relate to another wife and mother:\ “They didn’t want a relationship with her, they just wanted her to exist somewhere in the background (I haven’t got any clean clothes). If she died, would her soul migrate? Into an insect, a tadpole, a bean?”\ Trudi and Charlene reappear in the last story, having lowered their sights from dreaming of \ “peaches in Moscato wine, Madagascar green peppercorns, rose-petal champagne. . . "\ to something they think is more realistic.\ “ ‘ From now on,’ Trudi said, ‘I only want good, simple things. A bushel of russet apples, a truckle of cheddar cheese, a firkin of bloodred win. Clean linen sheets, rinsed in lavender water and then dried in the sun and the wind on an old-fashioned rope in an orchard. A good book, a small dog, a single strand of pearls.’ “\ Which is why we read--to transport ourselves out of our We Need Coffee, What's in the Fridge lives to either the imaginary delicatessen or the Good Life (but with power and indoor plumbing).Quirky, well-written stories. Reliable Atkinson read that gives pause for thought.