Four of the 10 short stories in Huma Qureshi’s debut collection are set on holidays. In Summer, a grown-up daughter invites her mother along on a family trip to the south of France, with fraught results. In Foreign Parts, tensions arise between Mark and his wife, Amina, during a visit to Lahore. In Waterlogged, a tired mother nursing a newborn is irritated by her partner while staying at a genteel B&B in Oxford. And in Small Differences, Tasneem feels alienated while holidaying with her boyfriend, Simon, and his family in Tuscany.
This makes sense because holidays, whether with partners, children or extended family, can be flashpoints for conflict and realisation. When Simon wanders off with his parents, leaving Tasneem browsing at a market stall, she searches for them, alarmed, until she finally spots their golden heads, happily seated at a cafe and absorbed in conversation without her. Qureshi acutely observes how “she felt it then. Their sets of pale grey eyes upon her, innocent and uncomprehending small moons. There it was, the space wide between them. Simon and his parents on one side, and then her on the other.”
On holiday, we betray otherwise carefully concealed anxieties. Perhaps it is the fatigue of travel that sparks irritability, or the discombobulation of new places that somehow more sharply illuminates faults that are usually overlooked. Whatever the case, it’s also true that short story collections, when the tales are neat and portable like Qureshi’s, are good company on travels. Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love feels like an excellent holiday book – making it a slightly odd release for autumn.
Still, these are well told stories with well realised characters. Qureshi’s plots unfurl purposefully, sometimes to reveal a sting in the tale. Her concerns are domestic – first love, friendship, estranged mothers, discontented wives, families that fall apart, marriages that limp on – with the understanding that these are the things that matter most of all. She knows, too, that behind every relationship is some hidden wound, and she compels her characters to confront theirs.
In Premonition, the very fine opening story, a chance meeting prompts a British Pakistani woman to remember a teenage crush. It floods her with an upswell of old feelings – lust, longing and something else more painful. It’s a story about first love, tenderly observed, which turns, just as things start to feel saccharine, into a more complicated reflection on consent and how sexual double standards can be reinforced by cultural prejudices. Qureshi’s trick is to write appealingly about teenage desire and then steer us into thinking about harder things.
The book’s characters are Asian or in cross-cultural relationships, and yet race is only one aspect of their lives. Sometimes it lends a certain inflection to particular experiences. In The Jam Maker, a child is divided between Pakistani immigrant parents: her assimilated, charming and adulterous father, who works as a GP in an English village; and her betrayed mother, who longs for home. Qureshi is as interested in the emotional differences as the cultural ones, and so race is never obtrusive or overpowering in her narratives, only a true and realistic facet of the worlds in which her characters live. In The Jam Maker, what Qureshi really notices is the determined cruelty of an unhappy child and the unspoken forgiveness extended by the mother.
It’s a different matter entirely for the daughter, Reem, in Summer, reluctantly holidaying with a mother who provokes guilt and fury equally. The two of them bring to the south of France a lifetime of recriminations and resentments, something perfectly ordinary but which manifests in a chillingly extraordinary way at the dramatic end of the story. You’ll need to read the shocking last paragraph again.
Other stories in the collection are diligent, sometimes close to sentimental: a tale about a student friendship gone awry in adulthood and another about a couple coping with repeat miscarriages are sensitive, seem personal and yet are thinly written. Qureshi is feeling her way with this form, and it’s to her credit that so many of these stories succeed. It’s a form she clearly reveres, with the titular allusion to Raymond Carver, and there is a whiff of Alice Munro in Qureshi’s sadly estranged mothers and daughters.
The most pointed clue, though, is the book that Tasneem delightedly discovers while browsing the market stall: a “nearly new copy of the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories translated into English”. It’s a hat-tip to their editor, Jhumpa Lahiri – another writer of south Asian heritage quietly reimagining the shape of the short story. When Simon thoughtlessly leaves the volume to be soaked by rain in the garden, Tasneem feels her “heart dip like a moth falling away from a bright light”. Qureshi, like Lahiri, is a companionable and considered writer, and this is a collection you can read enjoyably, rain or shine.
• Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love by Huma Qureshi is published by Sceptre (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
