Field Study: Stories

From the author of the award-winning The Dark Room, here is a strikingly powerful collection of stories that explores with haunting precision themes of guilt, love, and sacrifice. In a variety of settings–from the Scottish seaside to post—Communist Germany–Rachel Seiffert’s stories map the terrain of human behavior with a nuance and subtlety that are at once dazzling and unsettling. Powerfully evoking our need for connection, Field Study takes us on journeys that demonstrate both the fragility and adaptability of our emotions, and the vast potential for danger and vulnerability created by all types of love.

In “Reach,” “Dog-Leg Lane,” and “Tentsmuir Sands,” Seiffert explores the dynamic between parents and children, the special knowing that children have but don’t always express in ways their parents can understand. In “Francis John Jones, 1924—” she draws a portrait of an old man recounting an experience as a soldier in World War II that saved his life but left him with deep regrets. In “The Late Spring,” a man who has led a solitary life begins to accept what he knows will be his solitary death. And in “Blue,” two teenagers try to come to grips, in conflicting ways, with their first pressing desires for independence. Seiffert isolates and captures not only the underlying and compelling sorrow of love but also the joy and desire for love that keep us alive.