After a career as one of the literary world’s most gifted but unrecognised short story writers, Victoria Beckham had promised that there’s ‘at least one novel inside her’. To mark the publication of her Collected Stories by Penguin World Classics, the wife of the Real Madrid mid-fielder expressed her surprise that she has yet to finish a novel. ‘It’s not like I don’t like books,’ she said. ‘The problem we’ve got with our houses is that they’ve got lots of shelves. Books are good. They take up space.’

While critics have been quick to compare Victoria’s talents to those of Katherine Mansfield, the one-time pop star is quick to argue that she believes she can surpass Mansfield’s achievements by carrying her own gifts across into the longer form of the novel. ‘Her books are so thin,’ she says, ‘and they take up no room on my shelf. David said he’d have to buy hundreds of copies of her book just to fill the space where we’d planned to put his replica of the World Cup he should have won if it wasn’t for that horrible Portugal. We’ve put a goldfish bowl there instead.’

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