Property: A Collection. Lionel Shriver

      

      

       Copyright

      The Borough Press

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

      First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

      Copyright © Lionel Shriver 2018

      Jacket design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

      Jacket illustration © Shutterstock.com

      Lionel Shriver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      The Standing Chandelier was first published in 2017

      The Self-Seeding Sycamore was originally written for short story collection Reader, I Married Him edited by Tracy Chevalier and published by The Borough Press

      The Royal Male was first published in the Telegraph

      Exchange Rates and Negative Equity were first published in The Times

      Kilifi Creek was first published in the New Yorker

      Repossession was first published in the Guardian

      Vermin was first published in Stylist

      Paradise to Perdition was first published in Raffles Hotels & Resorts Magazine

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This collection of short stories is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

      Source ISBN: 9780008265229

      Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008265243

      Version: 2018-03-15

       Dedication

      TO

      BERGER:

       one of the three people who make

       my life worth living.

       Epigraph

      I bought a wood [ … ]. It is not a large wood—it contains scarcely any trees, and it is intersected, blast it, by a public footpath. Still, it is the first property that I have owned, so it is right that other people should participate in my shame, and should ask themselves, in accents that will vary in horror, this very important question: What is the effect of property upon the character? [ … ]

      If you own things, what’s their effect on you? What’s the effect on me of my wood?

      In the first place, it makes me feel heavy. [ … ]

      In the second place, it makes me feel it ought to be larger.

      —E. M. FORSTER, “My Wood”

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

       Dedication

       Epigraph

       The Standing Chandelier: A Novella

       The Self-Seeding Sycamore

       Domestic Terrorism

       The Royal Male

       Exchange Rates

       Kilifi Creek

       Repossession

       The ChapStick

       Negative Equity

       Vermin

       Paradise to Perdition

       The Subletter: A Novella

       About the Author

       Also by Lionel Shriver

       About the Publisher

       The Standing Chandelier

       A NOVELLA

       In bottomless gratitude, to Jeff and Sue. This is not about you.

      JILLIAN FRISK FOUND the experience of being disliked bewildering. Or not bewildering enough, come to think of it, since the temptation was always to see her detractor’s point of view. Newly aware of a woman’s aversion—it was always another woman, and perhaps that meant something, something in itself not very nice—she would feel awkward, at a loss, mystified, even a little frightened. Paralyzed. In a traducer’s presence, she’d yearn to refute whatever about herself was purportedly so detestable. Yet no matter what she said, or what she did, she would involuntarily verify the very qualities that the faultfinder couldn’t bear. Vanity? Flakiness? Staginess?

      For an intrinsic facet of being disliked was racking your brain for whatever it was that rubbed other people so radically the wrong way. They rarely told you to your face, so you were left with a burgeoning list of obnoxious characteristics that you compiled for them. So Jillian would demote her garb from festive to garish or even vulgar, and suddenly see how her offbeat