Cold enough for you? Try these short stories to turn up the heat as winter draws in …

‘Butterflies of the Balkans’

Jo Lloyd, author of the collection The Earth Thy Great Exchequer Lies, thinks of the short story as a huge thing contained in a small space – like a poem or a TARDIS or a neutron star. ‘Butterflies of the Balkans’ (my favourite in the collection) is like this – intricate and brimming with meaning. Dottie and Prue hunt rare butterflies in a pre-First World War landscape; older, but still ardent, lepidopterists who won’t be thwarted in their mission. Lloyd says the women ‘arrived whole, toting their opinions and their bits of luggage,’ and were a joy to work with. The melancholy ending took my breath away with its description of their last journeys.

‘My Bonny’

‘My Bonny’ is a beauty. The first story in The Earth Thy Great Exchequer Lies,  shows masterful form, historical heft and delightful originality. Jo Lloyd traces her long-forgotten ancestors through the 19th century. From bare facts of their lives in the census records, Lloyd creates a cast of characters whose viewpoints chart the progress of Agnes’s life over the decades. We see Agnes finding and losing people, changing addresses and occupations, and come face-to-face with a fully fleshed forebear rising from the page, authentic and intense.

‘A Love Picture’

My favourite story in Blank Pages by Bernard MacLaverty is set in Belfast in 1940. ‘A Love Picture’ features Gracie, whose son’s ship has recently been torpedoed in the war, its crew missing and presumed dead. When Gracie’s niece, Letty, brings word that she has seen Frank in a newsreel at the local cinema, Gracie heads out. It’s cold, dark and late but she’s compelled to confirm the sighting and convinces Johnny, a cinema staff member, to screen the reel. I felt Gracie’s hope against hope for her son’s survival, Letty’s affection for her aunt, and Johnny’s compassion for a woman in distress all rang true. A profound picture love.

‘Smokehouse 2’

‘Mostly, though, there was the absence of everything he used to be.’ Nora is riding the peaks and troughs of her partner’s decline from dementia in ‘Smokehouse Part 2’ – the final story in Smokehouse by Melissa Manning. It’s a brilliantly observed and brutally honest depiction of the complexities of being a carer. Ollie pees in the kitchen sink, cuts his hands with fence wire and almost launches headlong from their loft bedroom. Nora cares but also lacks patience, feels bitter and frustrated, grieves for her lost lover and companion. On their acreage in Tasmania, keeping Ollie clean, fed and safe is a full-time job few would sign up for – but for Nora there’s not much choice.

‘The First Real Time’

‘Her tongue is sugary. You … kiss until she pulls away. Everything is amplified; the cushions rustle like wood lice, the TV nags.’ Remember your early teenage fumblings towards intimacy? Limbs awkward, teeth crashing; the urgency pressing you forward and the self-consciousness threatening to drag you back. ‘The First Real Time’, in Pure Gold by John Patrick McHugh, perfectly evokes the tenderness and terror of a young lad’s early forays into sex – the embarrassment of pimples and blackheads, the anxiousness that parents might discover you, the pretence at school that there’s nothing to it, nothing at all.

‘Arcadia’

When Heddy falls pregnant it seems logical for Peter to move in with her and her brother Otto so he can live in the farmhouse and work on the orchard. Heddy goes to classes each day in town – hoping to improve herself – and seems to be drifting away. As time passes, Peter feels more and more hemmed in – and when Otto has a drunken late night party with a couple of women from the worker’s huts, Peter drives out to ask him to pack it in. Otto is dismissive. ‘Arcadia’ is from Daddy by Emma Cline. The story has a sinister edge to it, but also captures how a fairly ordinary life can feel like a trap – with each day only ever offering more of the same.

‘Harbour’

‘The house itself both looked like the pictures and didn’t. It was the same stately white weatherboard place with iron lacework and a broad verandah. But it looked scruffy, grimy, like it had just woken up after a bad night.’ In her marvellous short story collection Hold Your Fire, Chloe Wilson creates real estate you believe exists and quirky, unsettling characters you want to follow inside to see what happens to them. In ‘Harbour’ it is half-sisters Tilly and Thomasina. Their enmeshment is troubling even before they become entangled with Dr Bellavit (a practitioner of colonic cleanses) and things go terribly pear-shaped.