Available from:

Kobo
Foyles
Waterstones

SHORTLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE

What happens when we leave the places we’re from? What do we lose, and who do we become, and what parts of our pasts are unshakeable?

Linda Mannheim’s second short story collection focuses on people who have relocated – both voluntarily and involuntarily.

Opening with Miami-set political thriller, ‘Noir’, these exquisitely rendered set of stories will leave you reeling.

This Way to Departures is a deeply affecting portrait of American society and the constant search for a place to call 'home'.

‘Mannheim exposes the cracks in the facade of the American dream.’
– The Guardian

Available from:

Kobo
Foyles
Waterstones

LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE

All of the stories in Above Sugar Hill take place in New York between 145th and 181st Street, roads no one from outside the neighbourhood is expected to visit — a Puerto Rican Independentista fends off the FBI, a young girl spots Marilyn Monroe more than ten years after Monroe’s suicide, an opera-singing housing activist goes missing and presumed to have been murdered.

“Where I come from is tiny,” observes the narrator of one of the stories. “Women run the short block screaming when their purses get snatched. Blam blams and the fire of flying heat cut the night.”

A chronicle of the decades when Harlem and Washington Heights lay forgotten, Above Sugar Hill explores a part of New York that isn’t on tourist maps.

'Mannheim’s restive tales of her desiccated stretch of New York provoke and abide like a slap.'

– Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Available from:
Amazon

Risk begins on a train. It is 1999, and Hannah, a New York-born film researcher, is on her way to Johannesburg and crossing the terrain of her ex-lover Gem’s childhood. Next to her is the envelope he has sent her, and in it is the story of what happened to Gem when he was detained during South Africa’s state of emergency.

A detective story as well as a love story, a war story as well as a coming of age story, Risk is about the ways that the large movements of history affect the smaller movements of people’s day-to-day lives, the ways that personal identity is shaped by political conflict, and the ways we are changed when we cross geographical and emotional boundaries.

Originally published by Penguin SA, Risk was short-listed for Book of the Year by the journalist Jenny Crwys Williams.

Available on Amazon

Laura and Sam are obsessed with film noir. In their sun-drenched apartment in Miami, they watch 1940s black and white movies whose characters move in shadows and narrow slats of light. They 're fascinated by a Hollywood genre without happy endings where everyone is corrupt, where lovers betray one another, where the war might be over and the boys might be home, but nothing is going back to the way it was. And in Miami in 1986, the tide of another war is about to sweep in. Refugees are arriving from Central America. Cocaine kings cruise the highways with impressive artillery. Mercenaries rehearse in the Everglades for involvement in the Contra War. By November, 304 people have been killed in Miami. Anything can happen there.

Available on Amazon

In the dying days of South Africa’s Apartheid Era, as protests around the world call for an end to minority white rule, Cobus Steyn is on patrol with his local Commando Unit near the isolated Afrikaans village where lives. His beloved wife Sannie and their young son are at the centre of his world and his news comes from Apartheid government broadcasts and alarmist gossip. Warned that terrorists will lay siege by bombing water towers, cutting phone lines, and attacking homesteads, Cobus dutifully spends his Saturdays searching for armed members of the liberation struggle, watching for movements in the bush as he clutches his assault rifle. But when a sadistic Lieutenant baits him, Cobus finds himself battered by memories of the brutality he experienced as a conscript in the South African Defence Force. And as Cobus recollects the rite of passage he endured – starved, humiliated, and berated by his military superiors – he reassesses which side of the war he is on. ‘Trigger’ is a story about how brutal regimes maintain power and the costs and possibilities of challenging that power.

Available on Amazon

Managua is a haunted city for Alex Grossmeyer, a New York journalist there to report on the revolution in 1986. As she wanders the ruined streets during the Contra War, passes the shattered silhouettes of derelict apartment blocks, and watches cows graze on the empty lots where houses once stood, she remembers her refugee mother’s stories about Germany: ‘a wheelbarrow of cash she saw during the years of Germany’s inflation, the non-Jewish family who took her in towards the end of the war, dust raining down during the bombing of Frankfurt.’ By night Alex finds herself in the air-conditioned bar at the Intercontinental -- one of the few undamaged hotels in the city – drinking alone while with others, a rookie among war correspondents who are thicker skinned. Then Daniel Rappaport, an American supporter of the Sandinistas, encourages her to come with him to the mountains, into the heart of the region where there are frequent Contra attacks. There, in an isolated community where some of the children have gone missing, Alex finds herself confronting the violence she has always imagined was at the periphery and struggling with her mother’