Proceed With Caution

Following on from Safer Under the Stairs, Melanie Wyllie’s acclaimed first volume of short stories published in 2014, Proceed with Caution features six new stories set in Britain, Europe and America spanning three decades from the end of the Second World War. In her signature cinematic/poetic style, Melanie Wyllie brings the lives of ordinary people into dramatic relief, from provincial housewives forced to cope with the meagreness of 1950s austerity and the constraints of social mores, to young artists and entrepreneurs struggling to carve a future for themselves in Europe’s beleaguered cities. Interconnecting themes explore hopes and dreams (‘A Wedding Has Been Arranged’, ‘Proceed With Caution’), love and loss (‘Once Upon A Time’, ‘The Wind Grows Colder’), devastation, compromise, regret (‘Demons Seldom Sleep’) psychotic obsession and ruthless ambition (‘Scorn’), with understated sensitivity, empathy, shrewdness and wit.

Safer Under the Stairs is available from Amazon as a Kindle e-book. Proceed with Caution can be ordered from all bookshops and online outlets.