Jo Baker, "The Midnight News"

Jo Baker is the author of eight novels, most recently The Midnight News (April 2023). 

Previous books include A Country Road, A Tree (2017) which was shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Award, the James Tait Black Award and Walter Scott Prize, and was a Book of the Year in the Guardian and New Statesman. Longbourn (2013), which tells the story of what’s going on below stairs in the Bennet household in Pride and Prejudice, was an international bestseller and translated into twenty-two languages.  

Jo is an Honorary Fellow of Lancaster University and was a Visiting Fellow at the Queen’s University of Belfast. She is married to the playwright and screenwriter Daragh Carville. They live in Lancaster with their two children. Her website is here. 

About The Midnight News

September 1940, and Charlotte watches from her attic window as enemy planes crawl across the sky. She’s been doing her best to keep herself out of trouble, holding down a typist job at the Ministry of Information, sharing gin and confidences with her best friend Elena. 

On her way to work she often sees the boy who feeds the birds – a source of joy amongst the chaos and destruction. But as the Blitz continues, bringing with it devastating loss, she begins to sense a presence in the darkness. Someone is stalking the blackout, targeting her friends. And now he’s following her … 

From The Midnight News, by Jo Baker

The chaffinch weighs nothing. Its claws barely pinch his thumb; its head tilts to keep one bright eye trained on him as it jabs at the broken biscuit. The tiny stabbing in his palm makes him smile. It grabs a crumb, then flitters off. On the path, sparrows hop and pick at flakes of pastry that he’s scattered. He has to be discreet, to keep an eye out for police, or for anyone who looks his way too long; there’d be hell to pay if he’s caught feeding the birds. Well, there’d be a fine. But he loves their trust, their greed, their fragile beauty. One must find one’s happiness where one can, and he finds it in the quiet, illicit dispensation of crumbs. 
          Someone is coming down the path towards him. He brushes his palms off and the birds scatter; they tweet their protest from the bushes. He pulls his memoranda book from his pocket. Honest, Officer, just taking a breather, just jotting down a few musings; what birds? Oh those birds! Terrible nuisance aren’t they?  
          He looks up. And it’s her. His heart goes still. The girl. The honey-coloured girl is coming towards him. She moves with that easy loping gait of hers; she wears a bluebell-coloured skirt and cream silk blouse, underneath a leaf-green summer coat. 
          Beautiful.
          Mustn’t stare. 
          Where’s that pencil? He searches through his pockets. If he can just scribble something in his notebook; just to have something to do. Pencil. Pencil. Pencil. Where is his godforsaken pencil? 
          He has tried all his jacket pockets, and is reaching into his left trouser pocket – though why would anyone keep a pencil there just to get stabbed in the thigh? – when she stops directly in front of him. He slides his hand from his pocket, and lays it over the other, which is resting on the memoranda book. He looks slowly up. 
         Dear God, let her not be one of those people who’ll go out of their way to tell you what you’re doing wrong. That would be so disappointing.
         Her eyes are unusual; a clear light brown, like milkless tea. He has never been close enough to notice before. She has a funny kind of look about her, at once determined and exhausted and concerned. And then she smiles. A huge, guileless smile, full of pleasure. 
         ‘There you are,’ she says. And she sits down beside him.  
         There, undeniably, he is; he has never felt more so. Never felt more wedged into the reality of his body. Never more aware of the distinctness of this bench, this patch of gravel, these chrubs and plane trees. His black clothes. Her.
         ‘I am glad to see you,’ she says. 

Lynda Clark, "Dreaming in Quantum and Other Stories"

Lynda Clark’s debut novel Beyond Kidding was published in 2019, followed by the short story collection, Dreaming in Quantum. The collection contains several stories written during Lynda’s Creative & Critical Writing PhD, including 'Ghillie’s Mum,' which was shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Award and ALCS Tom-Gallon Prize and won the Europe and Canada Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Lynda lives in Forfar, Scotland, and works as a Research Fellow in Narrative and Play. She’s currently writing more short stories, and a novel, which may be downsized to a novella if it doesn’t start behaving itself pretty soon. You can follow her on Twitter or view her sporadically updated blog.

About Dreaming in Quantum

Dreaming in Quantum is a collection of speculative stories, covering subjects from cloning to changelings to cannibalism, usually infused with dark humour. As the name suggests, the imagined worlds contained in the collection overlap with our own and one another, yet diverge in ways that might be macabre or magical. 

Below you can read an extract from the final story in the collection, ‘Phoenix’.

From Dreaming in Quantum, by Lynda Clark

Extract from 'Phoenix'

Sym stared into the open pit of the hearth. Nothing but ash and dust; a few lumps of kindling turned to carbon. And yet he couldn’t stop staring. A vortex seeking to suck him in. 

Four days now he’d sat in that armchair. He’d moved a couple of times, of course. Sipped a few mouthfuls of water from the rain butt outside, retrieved the last hard crust of bread from the cupboard and returned to his seat to gnaw at it like a rat. For the first couple of days he’d stooped over the rain butt to wash and afterwards had run a comb through his hair.

A pointless ritual. 

His eyes flicked to the mantelpiece, as they were wont to do. He couldn’t look at the urn, wouldn’t. He refused. But his sadist eyes determinedly steered his attention back to the burnished brass handles – representations of long, curled feathers – and the lid, an ornate dome engraved with a flaming heart. Typical of her to choose something so quaint and ostentatious. Typical of her to choose the thing at all. He’d told her it was morbid, strange, upsetting to him for her to do so. But she had just tilted her chin downwards in that way of hers, like she was trying to hide her amusement. Her eyes were dark and bright, like a deer’s but without a trace of fear. 

‘Don’t be silly!’ she’d scolded him. ‘Nothing morbid about it! It’s wonderful.’ 

Wonderful. 

Even in his thoughts he spat the word. 

You can read the complete short story here.