The Apple

Title: The Apple - Crimson Petal Stories
Author: Michel Faber
Canongate Books, 2007

This collection of stories are mildly engaging, more so if you have read and loved The Crimson Petal and White. Here, we encounter many of the same characters, often set in time before or after their appearance in the novel. The stories about Sugar are, maybe surprisingly, not the most enticing in the collection. Compared to the portrayal of her in the novel, these brief sketches are rather flat and fail to deepen our understanding of her. My recommendation must be to skip this collection in favor of the predecessor that inspired it or even for Faber's debut novel Under the Skin.