Sophie Shillito

Praise

Here are some lovely things other writers have said about All The Little Places

“Sophie Shillito's writing is visceral, gleaming, sharp, and above all graceful. All The Little Places is perfect both to dip or delve into - a journey through the vivid details of our world that are too easily overlooked.”

Jessica J. Lee

“All the Little Places invites the reader to share a train ride through a disturbing landscape, part dream, part nightmare. With echoes of Under Milk Wood, Shillito's prose poem is genuinely impressive. It is difficult to make a success of the fable form, but the author has done so, with flying colours.”

Ken Worpole

“As a I read this book I was hypnotized into that half-dreaming state that only a train journey can summon, where imagination begins to embellish and the world becomes ravishingly strange. Full of intriguing glimpses of both passengers and a world outside the window, which peel back the layers to show us what lies beneath: the secret, greasy, blemished lives that pass by us in a flash, and leave us to wonder at the flawed tapestry of human experience. Unsentimental yet tender, grotesque yet beautiful, this book will travel with you as gaze from the windows of trains.”

Zoe Gilbert

“We all make train journeys and some of us look out of the window at the world, or worlds, outside. We glimpse the lives of people, plants and animals; all are separate: here today, gone tomorrow. But are they? What if there were links? What if it was one reality and not isolated events that we were watching? In her first book Sophie Shillito reveals a fascinating place where darkness and poetry frame a very different picture of our times.”

Francis Pryor

"Here are some stories that are almost parables and stories that are almost folktales, fetched out by a dark imagination from backstage at a very familiar world ... They work in chiaroscuro, painting darkened and deepened portraits of what might be going on behind what we can see."

Tim Dee

"A bold portmanteau-piece of modern fairytale writing that snapshots into collage the changing views from a train journey, exploring and expanding the stories behind the brief glimpses through a window to create a haunting web of lives, and a measure of living on this earth that will stay with you."

Rob Cowen

"These are the fragments of our lives painted and forgotten, each page a torch to see through tunnels into the ruined cities and the drowned dreams beneath them. A collection of the dusted stories and ashes we keep hidden, the rusted songs and broken compass hearts rattling into the next galaxy. All The Little Places witnesses the secrets of our spaces, impeccably mapping and cataloging each lost memory in the great library of loneliness."

Tamryn Bennett