Diamonds

James Eddy's spellbinding collection of short stories, circles the lives of Scott Drake, a British singer-songwriter, and Rebecca, the passionate, intelligent young woman he had once loved and may yet love again. The revelation of both their shared and individual pasts is only the beginning of a story that features the contributions of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. A man lost in love, a compulsive young thief, a single mother in the twilight of her youth, and a middle-aged man grieving the death of his mother and his lost dreams, all form the foreground and background to the larger story; of love lost, delayed and denied. We first meet Scott in his early twenties, running away from his guilt at the death of a friend by trying to help another. Five years on, he has found success as a musician but his feelings have changed very little; there is the same guilt as before, along with even more that has been piled on top of it, while his ability to self-destruct has not been diminished by the years. We learn the causes of these things and the sadness that can come with survival. We meet Rebecca at the moment she decides that she has to take a chance to see Scott again - at one of his gigs she finds a way backstage to meet him, her name opening doors in ways she hadn't expected. We then encounter her aunt, Lily, and cousin, Diane, as circumstances envelope them all and place further obstacles into the path of her and Scott. Written in an array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to surrealism to poetry, Diamonds is a book about the interplay of love and death, about survival, and about how hope can be nourished and set into motion by even the smallest of words and gestures.