Eley Williams’s new short-story collection, Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good, plays with the idea of an intended reader, a specific second person. In the title story, a radio announcer who is reading the shipping forecast stops addressing the ‘listening nation’ and instead dedicates ‘this Cape Wrath to Rattray Head including Orkney to my one specific darling listener, to you’. The announcer is apologising to his spouse after an argument, adding a personal touch to the lexicon of wind and water. There’s a measure of romance in this refocusing, the authorial equivalent of lowering one’s voice at a party. The couple have lost a child. After calculating how many teardrops are in the world’s oceans, the announcer notes, with understated passion, ‘In terms of tears, I think together we have managed something similar on a quiet weekend.’ 

These nineteen stories are built around familiar formulae; their materials are politeness, small talk and off-the-cuff inventions that serve to reassure or plaster over gaps through which existential thoughts and feelings could otherwise gush. Apologies and British tics have a particular draw for Williams, whose narrators are unfailingly self-deprecating. One, waking up on the sofa, wonders whether she was ‘hoping she would get lost down the back of it’ the previous night, like the roughly ‘£1 billion’ that is ‘lost, or lying idle, in the UK’s 24.7 million households’. 

In the opening story, the narrator’s attempt to cheer up an unhappy crush by sharing a livestream of walruses in a zoo fails when, with ‘some kind of braying and something like lancing, remorseful, loud and long and clear’, the walruses mate. The only action comes in the first