AQA's modern prose anthology for some schools is Telling Tales — a collection of short stories by contemporary British and Irish writers including Hanif Kureishi, Helen Simpson, Andrea Levy, and others. For Paper 2 Section A, if your school studies Telling Tales, you will have essay questions on the collection as a whole, focusing on themes, voice, and form across multiple stories.
Note: other schools study a single modern prose or drama text (e.g. An Inspector Calls, Lord of the Flies). The guidance below applies specifically to students studying Telling Tales.
What Telling Tales is
The anthology collects short stories of very different kinds — comic, tragic, satirical, domestic. What unites them is their exploration of ordinary lives in extraordinary moments — the moment a relationship changes, a secret is revealed, or a character faces a choice that defines them.
Key themes across the collection
Voice and perspective — short stories are intensely focused on voice. The first-person narrator in Kureishi's stories is different from the third-person omniscient narrator in others; some stories use unreliable narrators; some use multiple voices. Comparing voice across stories is a high-value AO2 activity.
Relationships and the domestic — many stories are set within families, marriages, and friendships at moments of stress. The domestic space becomes charged with significance: the kitchen, the dinner table, the car journey.
Class and belonging — several stories (particularly those by Kureishi and Levy) explore the immigrant or outsider experience; class as a marker of identity; the feeling of not quite belonging.
Time and memory — short stories often work through retrospection; a narrator looking back at a moment whose significance is only clear now. The gap between past event and present understanding is itself thematic.
Gender and power — several stories examine the power dynamics within relationships; women's voices and experiences are foregrounded in Simpson's stories in particular.
Short story form — what to analyse
Short stories as a form have specific conventions:
- Economy: every word counts more than in a novel. One image must do the work of many.
- The single scene or moment: most short stories focus on one moment or a compressed narrative. The brevity itself is a technique.
- The ending: short story endings are particularly significant. They often refuse resolution (open endings); sometimes they recontextualise everything that came before (twist endings); sometimes they achieve quiet emotional closure.
- Voice: the narrative voice carries most of the short story's effect — its tone, its reliability, its relationship to the reader.
Exam approach for Telling Tales
The question will ask you to explore a theme or aspect of narrative across the collection — you are expected to discuss two or three stories in your essay. This is different from the single-text approach:
- Choose stories where you have specific textual evidence.
- Compare the stories' approaches as part of your AO2 analysis.
- AO3 context: the authors' backgrounds and the specific cultural/historical contexts of individual stories matter.
Context for key stories
- Hanif Kureishi — British-Pakistani; known for The Buddha of Suburbia; explores British-Asian identity, sexuality, class.
- Andrea Levy — British-Jamaican; Small Island explores Windrush-era immigration; her stories carry post-colonial context.
- Helen Simpson — explores contemporary women's lives, domesticity, and time.
⚠Common mistakes— Common errors
- Writing about only one story — the question expects two or three.
- Treating the stories as isolated — compare their approaches as part of your AO2 analysis.
- Missing the short story form's specific conventions — the ending, the single scene, the economy of language.
AI-generated · claude-opus-4-7 · v3-deep-english-literature