Structure

The short story “The Jam Maker” by Huma Qureshi follows a non-chronological plot structure, as the narrator alternates between the present and the past. The majority of the story is made up from flashbacks to her childhood, all centering around the summer that the narrator’s father died, as well as the relationship between the narrator and her parents.

The story begins in medias res, with the narrator recalling the summer when her father died:

There had never been a summer like it. 

That was what everyone in the village said when they stopped by our cottage and sat with my mother around our kitchen table, offering their condolences alongside small, neighbourly offerings of one-pot dinners, bottles of milk, loaves of bread. Even I remembered this time last year, the sad soggy rain, which lasted all summer long and made my mother cry and tu...