Mortality (Serpent's Tail 2006)
‘Immaculately sinister’ Olivia Laing, Times Literary Supplement
‘Just beautiful’ Katy Guest, Independent
‘A collection of his short stories dating back as far as 1990, Mortality finds Nicholas Royle returning to familiar psychic territory, much as his obsessive, weird or lonely characters are often compelled to do. We see that he’s been writing about films, art, photography and memories, remembered affairs and missed opportunities, sex, desire and obsession, killings, suicides and open verdicts, psychogeography, abandoned buildings, hidden lives, ghosts and doppelgängers for a long time now’ Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday
‘Nicholas Royle is so accomplished a novelist of the uncanny and messed-up that it was never going to be necessarily the case that his short stories would be as good as they are… The stories are best read one at a time (because they are disturbing). At the same time, they cohere beautifully: they share a tone, a way of seeing’ Roz Kaveney, Time Out
‘Menacing and uncanny, Nicholas Royle’s short stories are brief experimental vignettes of horror and seedy nastiness… Though Royle often writes in the first person, there is a cold, anatomising, objective intelligence at work here…’ Jerome de Groot, Guardian
‘Immaculately sinister’ Olivia Laing, Times Literary Supplement
‘Just beautiful’ Katy Guest, Independent
‘A collection of his short stories dating back as far as 1990, Mortality finds Nicholas Royle returning to familiar psychic territory, much as his obsessive, weird or lonely characters are often compelled to do. We see that he’s been writing about films, art, photography and memories, remembered affairs and missed opportunities, sex, desire and obsession, killings, suicides and open verdicts, psychogeography, abandoned buildings, hidden lives, ghosts and doppelgängers for a long time now’ Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday
‘Nicholas Royle is so accomplished a novelist of the uncanny and messed-up that it was never going to be necessarily the case that his short stories would be as good as they are… The stories are best read one at a time (because they are disturbing). At the same time, they cohere beautifully: they share a tone, a way of seeing’ Roz Kaveney, Time Out
‘Menacing and uncanny, Nicholas Royle’s short stories are brief experimental vignettes of horror and seedy nastiness… Though Royle often writes in the first person, there is a cold, anatomising, objective intelligence at work here…’ Jerome de Groot, Guardian
