Good Read
Lauren Molyneux curls up with a good book to review the latest best seller
Moving Pictures
Catherine Finch
Ribble Valley-based novelist Catherine Finch is once again capturing the hearts of readers with her newly released collection of award-winning short stories, writes Lauren Molyneux.
Featuring both new and familiar characters, the stories in Catherine Finch’s latest title, Moving Pictures, span decades and countries to provide an entertaining read that is at once refreshing and light-hearted, whilst equally absorbing, emotive and even poetic in some aspects.
Bringing together snippets of a handful of lives – a young mother just finding her feet after deciding to go it alone, an elderly man filled with regrets over a decision made in childhood, a middle-aged woman who remains committed to her career, with little time for anything else, a woman forced to reflect on her past after receiving sad news about an old friend and a young girl struggling to come to terms with the truth about her father – Moving Pictures offers a vibrant and intricate commentary on life, love, family and human relationships, highlighting the trials and the triumphs we all may come to face at some point in our journey.
As a unique voice in women’s literature, Catherine Finch captures well the struggles and sensibilities of her female characters, managing to develop and deliver them fully fleshed out despite using the format of flash fiction. Allowing us to visit an array of female characters, each at a different stage of life and facing a unique set of circumstances, Finch’s females are all equally real and relatable.
For fans of Finch’s other published works – Walking Apart and Walking Alone – Moving Pictures will provide an interesting insight into where the familiar characters of Helen and David were in the earliest stages of their development and may help to shed some light on how the final versions of both characters came to be.
A perfect piece of escapism which offers light reading material with substance, encouraging self-reflection and invoking emotion with every story, Moving Pictures is one to pick up and dive into when you have a spare five minutes, or read through and finish in one sitting. But what makes this collection particularly unique is the hope and intention expressed in the author’s commentary to have created a book which will never find itself settled on someone’s bookshelf – rather, she hopes, it will be passed along from reader to reader, bringing comfort and joy to everyone who finds it in their hands.
