Last time, I said there would be more about Rebecca F. John in my next post. This is that next post.

On Saturday, Parthian Books launched Rebecca’s debut collection of short stories, Clown’s Shoes. You can hear some of them on Radio 4Extra throughout the week.

This has been a big – some would say ‘breakthrough’ – year for Rebecca. Earlier in the year ‘The Glove Maker’s Numbers’ was shortlisted for the prestigious Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, and in October she won the PEN International Award For New Voices (for writers under 30) for ‘Moon Dog’. Both tales are in the Clown’s Shoes collection.

So what will you hear this week? The series begins on  Monday with ‘Bullet Catch’. Set in Vienna in the 1920s, Victor, an expatriate showman, seeks to sex up his cabaret act in the manner that the title suggests. Tuesday and Wednesday are devoted to a two-part version of ‘The Glove Maker’s Numbers’. As a general rule, we don’t like splitting short stories over two programmes, but this one was too good to leave out of the mix. Set in Victorian Britain, Christina – traumatised by the early death of her brother – believes she was spoken to by the Devil and has been confined to a sanatorium. She finds, if not solace exactly, at least an understanding of sorts through mathematics, sometimes conceptually but most often visually in the shapes of the numbers she sees. On Thursday we’re in Warsaw, in 1943 – ‘Matchstick Girls’ is a stark, beautiful tale about two young sisters trying to survive in a city where this is very hard to do. The week concludes with the title story, ‘Clown’s Shoes’: set in a theatre in 1930s Soho and narrated by a reluctant member of a tableau vivant.

Lloyd Hutchinson, who reads ‘Bullet Catch’, expertly picks up the darker, obsessional aspects of the story but also captures the showmanship with considerable brio and ‘schving.’ The remaining tales are read by Ruth Gemmell. Suffice to say that Ruth is one of the best readers I’ve worked with, and if you listen this week you’ll probably understand why.

In conversation with Richard Lewis Davies at Saturday’s launch, Rebecca confessed that structure wasn’t her strong point. The knee-jerk response was to agree: after all, the most striking thing about her work is the power of the voices. But on reflection, I don’t think this is entirely true. It’s intuition more than applying ‘rules’, but the internal structures of these stories – the progression of thoughts and emotions – are very secure.

Four of the stories are being broadcast, but there are fifteen in the collection. I hope you will listen and read all of them.

Clown’s Shoes is on Radio 4Extra all week (9-13 November) every day at 11 am and 9pm, and thereafter on BBC iPlayer for 30 days.

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A postscript prompted by music. For ‘The Glove Maker’s Numbers’ we used The Song Of The Birds, a traditional Catalan Christmas tune for no good reason beyond liking its mournfulness and its vibrations. I only learned of this beautiful piece last year. Privileged to attend the memorial service for the late, great Deborah Rogers at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, I heard it played on the ‘cello by Steven Isserlis. (So Deb, this one’s for you.) Since her death, the Deborah Rogers Foundation has been set up, including a Writer’s Award of £10,000 for “a first-time writer whose submission demonstrates literary talent and who needs financial support to complete their work.” You’ll have to be good – Deborah was always synonymous with quality – but if you are an emerging writer reading this, click on the links and …