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Chris Power’s first collection of short stories, Mothers, is peopled by the restless – forever walking, running, travelling, holidaying, city-hopping, doing anything not to stand still They are displaced, impulsive, sometimes desperate The narrator of one story summarises it as ‘the lightness of being far from home, the pleasure and terror of being free to do as I liked’ It carries the logic, though decidedly not the tone, of picaresque: travellers, like orphans, are liberated to situate themselves from scratch, living without ready-made definitions   This is certainly true of the three linked ‘Mother’ stories that structure the collection, which concern Eva: first remembering her childhood in Sweden; then travelling along the Costa Blanca; finally married with a daughter of her own She leads an unhappy life in the shadow of her parents’ death, and travel becomes a way of outrunning her problems, though even here she is following her own mother around Europe, carrying around her guidebook and allowing it to fall open at spine-cracked pages, as if consulting the mother’s spirit ‘It seemed to help if I kept moving,’ she confesses finally ‘Whenever I stopped moving everything became… too much’   Young Eva, in ‘Summer 1976’, reads food into everything: stacks of LPs are liquorice, the air stands thick as jam or greasy with a coming storm On a dare, the boy who lives next door throws an apple into one of the windows of their apartment block, where it bursts against the wall (But does she have to be Eva, and does it have to be an apple, so that the story drags around with it the creaking weight of the Biblical malum malum?) Later, after her mother’s death, her taste for life seems to dull She inherits her mother’s mute desperation; boys are now men, but they embody the same tension between threat and attraction Later still, tethered to a marriage and a daughter of her own, she loses all energy: stuck in one place, with no water running over her gills, she is reduced, depressed and couch bound   Listless and withholding, Eva is an unusual character to give the