![]() ![]() When her husband went off to the war, Berlin’s mother took Lucia and her younger sister to live with their grandparents in El Paso – Mamie and Grandpa both feature in a number of the stories included here, as do other members of the Berlin family, most notably Lucia’s sister.īerlin grew up fast. ![]() Before the war, Berlin’s father worked in the mining industry consequently, the family moved around a fair bit, spending time in Idaho, Kentucky and Montana. Lucia Berlin seems to have lived many lives during her time, and her work draws heavily on various experiences from her lonely and unhappy childhood right through to her more settled old age. This is a wonderful set of short stories, so raw and striking that I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ll read a better collection all year. Now, more than a decade after her death, Berlin and her work are reaching a much wider audience courtesy of this collection of forty-three of her pieces, A Manual for Cleaning Women, brought to us by the team at Picador. More than seventy of her stories were published during her lifetime, mostly in collections issued in the 1980s and ‘90s from small presses such as Turtle Island and Black Sparrow Press. The American short-story writer Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) is currently enjoying a bit of a renaissance. ![]()
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