Zero Gravity is Toronto author Sharon English’s second collection of short stories. The book is rooted in Vancouver, with side trips to British Columbia’s Kootenay mountains, Montreal and Delphi, Greece. English’s characters lead accelerated lives only to be seized by spiritual emptiness. Their attempts to escape -- by joining, by quitting, by falling in and out of love -- make for funny, insightful and intense reading. The author presents a fly’s-eye view of urban experience, coming at city life from multiple angles that unite, as the book progresses, into a vivid experience of isolation and adaptation. The book’s unusual imagery and controlled prose deliver an edgy and anxious commentary on a new century.
In this remarkable new anthology of stories, mostly set in Vancouver, Sharon English provokes, shocks, amuses, and finally satisfies the reader with her insights and her character studies. In lucid detail, she captures the lives of a series of slightly skewed protagonists. Using a blend of descriptive detail, convincing dialogue, and social comment, she creates scenes and characters that linger in the mind long after one has finished each story. Corporate inanity, coastal weather, personal foibles and neuroses -- all are evoked with wit and verbal dexterity.
The characters are the more fascinating because they are so ordinary, so recognizable, yet the reader becomes involved with each to such an extent that one regrets that the story must end. A young woman, gradually detaching from reality in her Toronto corporate position, flees to Vancouver where the dream state persists. Another successful executive can no longer see himself. A lightly dressed tourist survives a mountain night by immersing himself in a hot spring. A sixty-eight year old woman encounters, on a nude beach, the woman who stole her sweetheart forty years earlier. From these seemingly innocuous plot lines emerge stories that are fascinating and thought provoking and often very funny.