A Complete Success

Offbeat tales of human haplessness and the snares of love and friendship.

Set throughout Glasgow, Colette Paul’s poignant, sometimes hilarious stories follow a range of ordinary people negotiating the pitfalls of grown-up life – unplanned pregnancies, difficult exes, misbehaving children, sick pets, middling jobs, and returning to familiar places that no longer feel like home.

These are no simple tales of despair, however. With pitch-perfect dialogue and understated wit, A Complete Success wryly and intimately captures the isolation and miscommunication of middle age, the resonating impact of childhood failures, and the unshakable, untranslatable nature of the past.

In these compelling, unfailingly compassionate portraits of the complexity of modern Scottish life, Paul re-affirms her status as one of the country’s most essential writers of short fiction.

"Special and a must-read. The mainly Glasgow-based stories contain three elements – humour, minimalist language and ordinary character. These in themselves are not a rarity in storytelling; Raymond Carver and Alice Munro immediately spring to mind, but when they come together in seemingly effortless unison like they do in Paul’s stories, it is truly something special."      – Veronique Kootstra, Gutter