British writer Elizabeth Stott brings together three stories based on expatriate life in the Persian Gulf in the 1960s. Versions of two of the stories in 'This Heat' appeared in her collection Familiar Possessions in 2002.•Rose is frustrated with the lack of substance to her role as wife and mother when a neighbour offers her husband’s services to do simple repair, which brings unexpected consequences. •Catherine has ambitions but her family regard her as a dependable big sister and mother’s help. Her maturity and capabilities attract unwanted attention and humiliation. •Archibald Tupper is 37 and single. Mrs Wetherby is married to the vigorous Captain Wetherby, but why does she tease a single man?Elizabeth Stott’s short stories and poems have appeared in various places. Most recently: Nightjar Press, June 2013, with a short story chapbook 'Touch Me With Your Cold, Hard Fingers. In 2012 stories in 'The Warwick Review' and 'Tears in the Fence'. In 2011, in the anthology Murmurations, published by Two Ravens Press. Of her writing, the following has been said:Christopher Burns: ‘Elizabeth Stott’s fiction is notable for its lucid sensory detail and clear-eyed analysis of restrictive social groupings. Vivid evocations of time and place and an assured cropping of narrative strands…’Michael Hulse: ‘Elizabeth Stott’s exacting stories recall the distinction between substance and accident. The accidents are the details of everyday life that Stott so shrewdly observes. Quietly, dangerously, Elizabeth Stott walks the edge, bringing back her subtly unnerving reports.’Time Out: (of Familiar Possessions) ‘the …stories included here are amongst the best I’ve read for some time’Dream Catcher: ‘these deceptively gentle tales continue to haunt and unsettle the mind long after you've closed the book.'Of this collection: Kathleen Jones: ‘Elizabeth Stott is very good at showing us the uncomfortable truths that lurk beneath the tidy surfaces of people’s lives. Her characters have hidden desires, unacknowledged fears, complex vulnerabilities.'James Sorel-Cameron: ‘Elizabeth Stott’s wonderful stories are spare and intense. The enclosed expatriate world she describes has a claustrophobia that is not only to do with the heat, with lives lived on the periphery of a world of active men by whom all her characters are dangerously taken for granted.'
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