‘Welcome to the Club’, the first story of Samanta Schweblin’s newest collection, opens with a woman trying to drown. Despite her resolve, some involuntary part of her resists oblivion and she emerges from the lake she had chosen as her grave. She returns home, she showers, and for the rest of the story she reckons with the guilt she feels for the apocalypse she nearly subjected her family to. It’s a brilliant, haunting tale and the perfect emblem of the collection as a whole: a book of little tragedies and private griefs. In each of the six lengthy stories, Schweblin unravels one such tragedy with an incredibly delicate touch, revealing the regrets and resentments that lie beneath. As in her earliest work, there are touches of the surreal and fantastic – a horse dead, as if it fell from the sky; a lifetime of silent phone calls from the past – but they are consistently in service of the human dramas, punctuating the inherent horror of a family shattered beyond recognition.

Within this already excellent crop of tales, ‘An Eye in the Throat’ stands out as something patently exceptional – Schweblin takes her time establishing a father-son relationship that slowly falls apart after a heartbreaking series of mistakes and accidents, before totally devastating the reader in its final moments with a single, simple revelation. Schweblin’s debut story collection Mouthful of Birds – a seamless procession of nightmares and bad dreams – is one of my favourite books and a perfect demonstration of the short story’s ability to create horror. By contrast, this newer collection proves the form’s equal gift for tragedy, as any closure Schweblin offers barely fits within the confines of the page. After the troubled darkness of her earlier works, it feels as if dawn is finally breaking and yet I am no less haunted by Schweblin’s beautiful prose.