The Diary of Emma Anderson: From "Short Cuts", a short story collection

By Erik Boman

During a stormy night, a wounded WW1 soldier arrives at a remote New Zealand spa. The refuge is a world away from the raging combat – but the battlefield will not give up its claims so easily...
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Erik Boman is a writer from Oxford. He is the author of "Short Cuts" and was awarded with the A.M. Heath literary prize in 2011.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erik Boman
• Release date: Apr 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311565068

Erik Boman

Erik Boman is a writer based in Oxford, UK, where he shares a tiny house with his fiancée, two riotous daughters, a nutty dog and a sociopathic cat.When the sun is up, he designs for a travel website. At night, he writes, or wants to.His bookshelf is a tumultuous mess of speculative fiction, but at its epicentre are Neil Gaiman and William Gibson.The keywords for anything he writes are 'not here' - he's a friend of any text that takes the reader out of this world, and away to other places. Sometimes even nice places.

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The Diary of Emma Anderson

by Erik Boman

Published October 2014

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you wish to share this book with another person (other than lending it to her or him), please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return it to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

This eBook uses some actual locations and family names, however all events are fictionalized and all persons appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, living, dead or anywhere between or beyond, is entirely coincidental.

Cover image montage by Erik Boman

Copyright © 2014 Erik Boman

www.wanderingmind.net

The Diary of Emma Anderson

The following excerpt is from an early diary by my great grandmother, Emma Anderson.

The journal was found after Emma passed away in her home in Glendambo, Australia, where she moved after leaving New Zeeland in mid-1917.

Emma was an avid diarist and consistently recorded her life from an early age. At the outbreak of World War One, she abandoned her literature studies to aid returning soldiers, a task that took her from her familiar British isles to remote New Zeeland, and then on to rural Australia.

After she relocated to Australia, many of her entries detail her everyday life – the weather, her cooking and so on – and are of interest probably only to a local anthropologist.

The entries that lead up to her departure from Rotorua, however, are more curious. I have decided to publish these, in case anyone among the public can make sense of them.

I myself certainly cannot.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Anderson, London, August 11, 2009

June 1, 1917

A soldier arrived with rain tonight.

I and Sophie were awake, as were many others among the staff; Mount Tarawera was restless, and not an hour passed without rings forming