Book Review - Fortune Smiles

ADAM JOHNSON won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for his novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and he is also known for his collections of short stories.
One of those collections, Fortune Smiles, published in 2015, won the National Book Award for Fiction and The Story Prize the same year.
There are seven shorts in this collection, each very different from the other.
Nirvana tells the story of a man trying to come to terms with his wife's paralysis, and whose only source of comfort is listening to grunge band Nirvana and lamenting Kurt Cobain's untimely death, while Interesting Facts is about a cancer-stricken woman wondering how long her husband will wait before ­remarrying.
Other stories include Hurricane ­Anonymous, about a UPS driver who learns to accept his dying father while coping with the ­demands of being a single father; Dark Meadow, about a man trying hard to battle his attraction towards his underage neighbours; George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine, about a former Nazi prison warden who tries to overlook his dark past; and Fortune Smiles, about a North Korean defector who pines for home and the girl he loves.
Some stories drag on a bit, while others are easier to read. Still, Johnson ­manages to make his characters more human with their many flaws.