Two schoolgirls in Bolton take acid just before their English class. A film journalist shares tea and a Kitkat with Marcel Proust, more or less, during a long train journey. An afterparty turns into a crime scene. Colleagues, maybe in love, have lunch and don’t quite talk about their relationship. A woman flees to New Orleans and finds unexpected treasures there.
In her electric debut, Anna Wood skips through the decades of a woman’s life, meeting friends, lovers, shapeshifters and doppelgängers along the way. Delights and regrets pile up, time becomes non-linear, characters stumble and shimmy through moments of rupture, horror and joy.
Written with warmth, wit and swagger, these stories glide from acutely observed comic dialogue to giddy surrealism and quiet heartbreak, and always there is music – pop songs as tiny portals into another world. Yes Yes More More is packed with friendship, memory, pleasure and love.
Praise
‘The title which most shook me by the scruff last year was Anna Wood’s Yes Yes More More. A debut collection of short stories from an all-but-unknown writer, it flipped somersaults around the lumbering brachiosauruses on the bestseller chart. Its 13 slim stories boomed with life; they were ravenous, troubling and strange. They proved all that literature can do – and without a smidge of joy-seeking in sight.’
—Alex Diggins, Culture Assistant at The Telegraph
‘Fresh, funny, fabulous, Yes Yes More More had me gripped. These stories surprise and delight . Anna Wood is the real thing – a writer you immediately want more of.’
—Jackie Kay
‘Yes Yes More More gives us precisely realised worlds of gloriously observant and hyper-attentive specificity. Devoid of cliche, Anna Wood’s writing presents people and situations that are laugh-out-loud funny but there is stealth in her stories, an unshowy intelligence which makes them deeply satisfying.’
—Wendy Erskine
‘Vivid, heartbreaking and jubilant – I couldn’t get enough of Yes Yes More More. Anna Wood examines life under a brilliant shifting light, finding beauty, horror and meaning in every moment. A triumph.’
—Catriona Ward
‘Bursting with zing and vitality, Yes Yes More More is an absolute marvel of a short story collection. What it feels to be alive, to dance wildly, to be surrounded by friends.’
—Elizabeth Macneal
‘Anna Wood’s stories are urban, sexy, darkly and uniquely comic, and tuned to the zeitgeist like the bass player every band would want. Her prose has the precision and economy of the best poetry, deployed to offer us cinematic glimpses of the lives we recognise, endure and rejoice in. Fiction has a new star in its firmament.’
—Carol Ann Duffy
‘Sexy and sweaty and tender and weird, Yes Yes More More pulses with the pure joy of being human.’
—Ruth Gilligan
‘A writer of exciting contradictions, Anna Wood tackles the dynamics of desire and the vicissitudes of a rich inner life with lyricism and levity, in a literary register that is both frank and digressive, coolly detached one moment and achingly sincere the next. Yes Yes More More is intimate and surprising, a joy to read.’
—Sharlene Teo
‘Poignant and pulsating with quiet joy, these stories are full of those moments that flutter by, too quick to catch – the tastes, the throbbing sensations, fleeting connections, in-between times of reflection. Yes Yes More More reminded me of the sheer, delicious goodness of life. It made me want to live forever.’
—Alice Ash
‘This is a riot of a collection – wild, libidinous and greedy for life.’
—Naomi Booth
