Discovering a new writer is always a pleasure, but when it’s one whose work is as fresh as Jo Lloyd’s, it’s especially delightful. Though all but two of its stories have been previously published in various literary magazines, her debut collection, SOMETHING WONDERFUL, should expose her work to a wider audience. Whether she’s writing about contemporary London or a bygone era, her efficient characterization, economical, evocative prose, and overall command of her material are hallmarks of her work.

All of these qualities are displayed in one of the volume’s most powerful entries, “The Invisible,” which earned Lloyd the BBC National Short Story Award in 2019. Set in a Welsh village (Lloyd is a native of South Wales and still lives there) in the 17th or 18th century, it’s the haunting story of a lonely farmer named Martha, who claims to see a family of wealthy neighbors she calls the Ingrams.

"Jo Lloyd’s SOMETHING WONDERFUL marks the appearance of a talented writer. Surprises abound in every one of these stories and suggest that even more impressive art lies in her future."

Over time, the imaginary family becomes real for the villagers, expressing a kind of shared longing as they experience the cycles of rural life. They finally wonder, in the voice of the collective narrator in the story’s moving final sentence, if their phantom neighbors “ever dream of us, or only of morning, when they will come stepping through the rushes, pocket watches in their pale hands, passing through us like a breeze through leaves, a wave through water.”

Lloyd’s modern tales include “The Ground the Deck,” the story of Megan, a young woman who dreams of working in television, film or magazines while she toils away at her data entry job. She moves into a tiny, impossibly expensive London flat already occupied by Licia, an artist, and Xander, a writer, that becomes “almost affordable” on her arrival, while she and her flatmates are confident they’ll survive their current deprivation and “beat through it to the lives they were supposed to live, where they would subsist on air and art and sunlight.” It’s enough to say that things don’t work out exactly as planned.

In “Work,” an unnamed female narrator finds herself underemployed in a restaurant alongside Gareth, a prickly sous chef, someone who had that “shrunk-in-the-wash look of people who’ve been too busy taking illegal substances to eat.” It’s one of many examples of Lloyd’s deft character sketches, like the minor character in the story “Your Magic Summer,” whose “hair suggested wisdom but his feet suggested he had lost touch with part of himself,” or elderly widow Dottie, one of the protagonists of “Butterflies of the Balkans,” who had “learnt to negotiate deafness and cajole her rusting joints into motion.” When Gareth departs, the narrator is reminded only of his claim that work is like dope: “Sometimes it makes you high, and sometimes it makes you sick. But mostly it just softens the edges, so you won’t wonder how to use your days, or notice that they’re passing.”

The collection concludes on a strong note. “The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies,” anthologized in THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2018, takes place in the second half of the 17th century. It traces the fateful journey of a British nobleman identified only as “HM,” who is engaged in a desperate bid to save a silver, copper and lead mining enterprise, his “vast, modern machine of industry,” that was intended to bring him great riches, but instead may lead to his ruin, as “nature put her pert nose in the air and turned her back” on him and a host of investors now clamoring for their promised return.

Lloyd describes HM’s perilous trip in the company of a mysterious man named Tall John. The story’s momentum carries it briskly along like most of the tales here, and it concludes with an eerie vision of the England that will emerge in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century: “The rails gleam in the dawn like spiderwebs, and the song of gears drowns the birds. At night, the stars, the planets, the moon herself are dimmed by the glitter of furnaces.”

Reminiscent of some of the work of authors like Jim Shepard and Karen Russell, but wholly her own, Jo Lloyd’s SOMETHING WONDERFUL marks the appearance of a talented writer. Surprises abound in every one of these stories and suggest that even more impressive art lies in her future.