Tara June Winch leapt into the spotlight a decade ago with her debut novel, Swallow the Air, at just 23 years of age. Within a few years, Winch had received six major prizes, including the David Unaipon Award for Unpublished Indigenous Writers and the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. This innovative program pairs promising young artists with internationally recognised masters, and for a 12-month period Winch worked under the tutelage of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. The relationship appears to have been a fruitful one.

This collection of short stories is a skilful exploration of characters who seem to inhabit a nebulous world: visible, present and yet somehow adrift on the margins of society. In ‘Failure to Thrive’, a young Nigerian comes to New York to complete an internship at the UN. His ambition at the outset is sharp: he has his sights set on a graduate position at Goldman Sachs. The ensuing weeks see his blustering confidence ebb. Buying sparkling water for a party thrown by the other wealthy interns, he is approached by an elderly lady who slowly and carefully explains that he needn’t buy water in America: ‘We have a lot of clean water here, it’s not like Africa.’ Later at the party he feels suffocated as he watches the interns who have spent the past months working on the intractable problems of the developing world, yet here they are, ‘laughing after everything we know – all the shit in the world – and they were just drinking and laughing’.

In the darkly humorous ‘Happy’, a young couple, Jules and Thomas, have ‘traded in their fuller, busier lives in the city’ to settle in a deeply conventional small rural town. Both find themselves discontent, but each in their separate ways. When the neighbours hand over their house keys and ask them to feed the cat for a week, Jules and Tomas begin to take minor liberties, as though trying on someone else’s life for size.

After the Carnage is a fine collection of stories and bodes well for her next novel, due out later this year.

Reviewed by Marian Barker