Florida

Florida is a collection of short stories by the American writer Lauren Groff, published in 2018. The state is the one constant across the collection, which takes its name from the place rather than from any of the people in it.

The pieces move between characters, towns, decades and even centuries, and the state itself is the one constant in them. Two sisters are left to look after each other; a man remembers a lonely childhood; a couple with no children cannot settle; a homeless woman keeps searching; and a wife and mother who appears in more than one story carries on a struggle she does not describe to anyone. The storms, the snakes and the sinkholes sit at the edge of these lives rather than at their centre, and the threats that matter most are the human ones. The collection won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and many of its stories had appeared in magazines first.