The Other End of the Rainbow - David Gardiner

James Joyce meets Ray Bradbury in David Gardiner's second collection of tales wrapped in the imaginings of a Cassandra/Wandering Jew-type sage whose words open doorways into landscapes of the imagination, both bright and profoundly dark. These are short stories in the full-blooded sense, with beginnings, middles and ends. Binnacle Press, in naming it as Book of the Month, said of the first Rainbow Man collection: You pick up this book with its charming exterior thinking you are going to read a collection of equally charming short stories, seasoned perhaps with a little grit to raise it above the tame, but what you actually get are jawdropping vignettes of the sort of lives only a writer of David's calibre could relate with such vivid and at times disturbing realism, and all this whilst at the same time managing to avoiding the usual, the jaded and the hackneyed to ensnare your attention. Nothing is as it seems and the more mundane the surface, the more layers there appear to be; we are talking about a true literary onion here, multi-layered and quite able to bring tears to your eyes. The Irish Emigrant magazine told us that: ...without exception all twenty-three of the stories, exploring life both familiar and unfamiliar, leave the reader with something to think about, and linger in the mind long after the final page is turned. The present collection is all of the above, and more.