Whoever You Choose to Love: Stories - Softcover

From bedsitland to the more quotidian tableaux of the suburban family home, young Glaswegian Colette Paul writes uncommonly affecting stories about Scottish women who both feel and seem just one step out of line. Coming to focus more than once on the gaps - generation, aptitude, aspirations - that befall mohers and their daughters, Paul writes with confidence, especially about the concessions made to 'reality' in terms of relationships and surroundings. (i-D MAGAZINE (May '04))

For someone so young, Paul's prose is stunningly perceptive. Her debut, WHOEVER YOU CHOOSE TO LOVE, is a collection of slick, quirky shorts which, despite the primarily domestic themes, have vast scope and cutting wit. Paul adds a modern, powerful spark to an oft-dismissed genre. (Henry Sutton ESQUIRE)

I couldn't put WHOEVER YOU CHOOSE TO LOVE down. It is brilliant. Funny, desperately sad, heartbreakingly recognisable, incredibly emotionally astute chronicles of human haplessness...Devastatingly truthful and written in delicate, tough, lovely lucid prose. Colette Paul really knows how to make a beautifully built short story. (Liz Lochhead)

[an] amazing debut collection of short stories...[Colette Paul] writes short stories that are both more polished and far better observed than anyone has a right to do..if WHATEVER YOU CHOOSE TO LOVE is a guide, whatever she chooses to write about next will at least be quirkily individualistic, unpredictable and oddly true to life...This is a writer who knows her own mind, and - as her first book makes absolutely plain - it's a mind that's well worth knowing. (David Robinson THE SCOTSMAN (8.5.04))

The beauty of short story anthologies is that they can be dipped in and out of, but Colette Paul has defied this by writing a collection so compelling it's a wrench to put them down...This author has a rare talent that allows the power in the story to be not what is written in black and white, but that which has been left unsaid...This is an outstanding debut. (Shari Low DAILY RECORD (15.5.04))

[Paul's] skill is to make the mundane interesting, and her characters likeable...She already has theart of pinning people to paper. (Fiona Hook TIMES (22.5.04))

[an[ exquisitely carved short story collection. (Brian Donaldson THE LIST (13.5.04))

The stories are united by a wistfulness; a sense of disappointment acknowledged but not explored. And they're wonderful. Paul may be young, but she understands a lot...Her point may be that life owes us nothing, but she leavens the melancholy with wit and acute sympathy for human complexity. (Lottie Moggach TIME OUT (2-9 June 2004))

a collection of quirky, optimistic and at times melancholy stories which bristle with anger and wit and, most of all, with a kind of wide-eyed energy. Set in Glasgow mostly, they are contemporary tales, urban but never mundane. (GREENOCK TELEGRAPH (4.6.04))

an assured debut of fictions from an astoundingly young writer. (CITY LIFE (MANCHESTER, 26.5.04))

There is something almost unbearably poignant about the young voices that make up this outstanding first collection from a talented newcomer to the Scottish writing scene. They're optimistic, quirky, melancholy voices, but bristling with energy and humour. There are echoes of the wit of a young Muriel Spark in these contemporary tales of modern lives, a way of twisting the mundane to make it seem extraordinary. A young woman goes to see the father who left her when she was a baby and ends up having to have a look at him in his coffin, a little girl watches from the top bunk as her older sister gets ready to go out, disappointed schoolgirls lie in wait for flashers, a woman takes her ill child with her on a hot date. 'Saturday night. Mum and dad discussing whether his new slippers look manly enough. Jesus wept.'