All the Places We Lived - Richard Owain Roberts

With his first collection of short fiction, Richard Owain Roberts joins a group of writers including Chris Killen, Socrates Adams and Alice Furse who are documenting the mundane aspects of twenty or thirty-something modern living with deadpan, understated prose, livened up with flashes of surrealism. The vignettes presented in All The Places We Lived reflect the influence of social media and marketing on our perception of the world and the people around us, with a darkly comic humour.

Like Killen and Adams in particular, Roberts creates strange, disjointed narratives; his prose features lists, brutally short sentences, social media updates and offbeat pop-culture references – including, in this case, Eazy-E and Coronation Street's Evil David Platt. His characters are somehow distanced from the world, their interactions mediated by technology. Their recent memories are shallow and mediated, which prevents the forming of strong emotional bonds but makes the pull of nostalgia stronger. As one character states: 'I struggle to remember things unless I take a photo or make a short video recording'.

In one story, Hi, Concept, Roberts describes a new housing development which has been planned by a committee of academics, using algorithms to create an ideal, rational environment. Like a smartphone, each house features a Siri-esque artificial personal assistant, and every conversation which takes place in the house is recorded. A variety of playback options are available, including the ability to 'filter raised voices, enhance camaraderie, delete argument, reveal subtext', allowing the inhabitants to curate their memories, whilst relieving them of the responsibility of interpreting the other person’s intentions. The story reflects a fear that modern technology has an infantilising effect on users, stunting emotional intelligence and making our choices for us.

Roberts also accurately describes the way that marketing has begun to influence our self-perception. His characters frequently talk in percentages, viewing the world through a statistical prism ('the lecturer says, Yeah, at the end of sixty to seventy percent of her sentences...the lecturer is disliked by fifty to sixty percent of the intake'). They are also deeply conscious of their personal brands. One character, beginning a new relationship, notes that 'Kay ~ Geoff synergy' has caused 'an upsurge of popularity and buzz around her brand'.

There are a smattering of slightly unhinged celebrity cameos from Kanye West and James Franco ('I work hard, harder than nearly anyone, harder than probably Barack Obama. No, not that hard, but hard. I work hard and what I do has merit, artistically, and maybe in thirty years from now, maybe sixty, people will say: James Franco...he put it all out there, good, good, we're glad'), but overall, the focus is on the mundane and everyday. Roberts is able to tease comic details from these scenarios, making All The Places We Lived an enjoyable and insightful debut.