Florida by Lauren Groff (Penguin, 1991)
Even if you think you don’t like reading short stories, every so often a writer will dazzle you into changing your mind (think Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, William Trevor). Lauren Groff, an award-winning American , joins this celebrated crew. Florida was praised highly in The Sunday Times: ‘A fine collection…The characters in these stories set in the southern state endure extreme weather, power cuts and other serious threats, but the book as a whole is buoyed up by a sense of survival and teeming life…As a terrain for fiction Florida is well-suited to Groff’s style, lush and tinged with paranoia. This is not just a place but a state of mind.’ Unforgettable.