Brunty Country

The new book by Kate Clanchy, The Not-Dead and the Saved,  is a collection of short stories  which contains a very Brontë-related one: Brunty Country.

The Not-Dead and The Saved and Other Stories
Kate Clanchy
Picador
ISBN: 9780330535250
Publication date: 18.06.2015

A beautiful and moving collection of stories about love and loss from the 2009 BBC Short Story Award winner and poet.
None of us are perfect, in the way we love, age, or view the world. The Not-Dead and the Saved offers us an opportunity for reinvention: of ourselves, those we have lost, and the world in which we live. From a man doomed to spend his life trying to find solutions to cancer; to a new mother haunted by a swaddling, tablet-eating great-aunt; to an intrepid literary agent who travels to the Yorkshire Moors to discover the next big thing, and ends up eating Anne Brontë's rock cakes, we meet a host of characters who are desperately, creatively, and often hilariously trying to evade the underlying truths of their lives.
The Not-Dead and the Saved is a cascade, of warm, wise and insightful stories about human nature, frank, funny, and sometimes desolating, but always underpinned by tenderness, and by a faith in enduring bonds of love.

Brunty Country was first published as ‘The Real Story’ in the 2011 Asham Awards anthology, Something Was There, edited by Kate Pullinger.

Amanda Craig reviews the book in The Independent:

It's a relief to find a story as straightforwardly funny as Brunty Country, in which a patronising media-savvy agent encounters Charlotte and Emily Brontë and fails to recognise the genius hidden in a "five-foot figure in a Laura Ashley nightie… and a grey little goblin face."