Coherence - The Essence and The Form

There are plenty of books about reaching that moment. There are very few about the morning after it.

You have probably had an hour, or a season, when the long work of becoming someone stopped of its own accord, and what was left was enough. And you know what tends to follow. The noise starts up again, and somewhere in the returning noise you decide the quiet was never real.

These stories were written against that verdict.

COHERENCE is fifty-two short stories that are really twenty-six, each one told twice...

The people are ordinary and the weather is northern. A retired postie kneels in an empty kirk on a Tuesday and asks for nothing. A hill farmer ends her family's name while the ending is still hers to make. A grandfather is bounced helpless by a castle-load of bairns, stone-cold sober, and goes back and does a seat-drop on purpose for the first time since 1965...

There is no practice in this book. Nothing to join, nothing to believe, and nothing at the end to buy.