Wilder Winds (2018, tr: Laura McLaughlin, 2022) is a slim volume packing sixteen short stories that whizz by on the page but linger on the mind. Set in various locations and times these are the lives of women and girls living through an unfair world; where inequality is everywhere, be that by gender, race, class, or geography.

While each story is different, there are recurring themes and images dotted around. Olid takes us into several locations where children are incarcerated or to the heart of recent revolutions that brought forth democracy. They show the world’s injustices but also that they can be overcome.

In Sea of Maimunà, a girl makes a friend in a refugee camp and ponders the disparity in their lives and how they approach this. Three considers the flight of a woman’s children growing up with the lives of those cared for in the prison nursery she’s just retired from. Red has a girl observe a woman give birth in a city under siege.

Interesting issues as the aforementioned are, I found myself drawn to the smaller moments on offer. In Static, where a traffic jam and life are conflated; or Anna Anne Anna, the narrator, who once found a bruised copy of Anne Frank’s diary, finds female representation in print and the value of such. Sexual harassment in public places gets taken on in Linda, and Invisible captures the unseen contribution to society of the low-paid worker.

While a political work Olid’s stories aren’t fiery polemics. Instead they are presented as thin slices of life where the injustices are there, woven into the details, often subtle, daring us to read deeper and get angry. But no matter how bad these characters’ lives are, there’s optimism waiting for them on the next unwritten page.