I like to ventriloquise my characters'

On her latest collection of short fiction, and on using the second-person narratorial voice in a story

- Simar Bhasin

Tell us about the narratives that make up Openings? Were there any thematic strands that brought the collection together?

That's a really good question. Interestingly, my first collection, Multitudes, was very much Belfast girlhood and young womanhood. My second collection, Intimacies, was motherhood. When it came to writing the stories in Openings, I found I had greater technical abilities. I had greater range. There's one story set in Berlin; one set in Morocco; there's a story set in the London Blitz. And I was thinking, "What is it that ties these stories together?" I didn't know consciously.

When I finished the collection and put the stories together, I realised that the title story held the key. And the title story is