We first meet our narrator Rose as she is arrested in the 1990’s while studying at university. She’s met a fellow student called Harlow who announces her appearance on the scene with a whirlwind explosion of noise and anarchy. Dragging Rose into her escapades, she seems to neatly fit a hole in Rose’s life left by long disappeared sister, Fern. Rose and Fern were brought up by their parents as a sort of home experiment by their psychologist father, and the repercussions of that experimentation […]
A road-trip through medieval Europe, seen through the naïve and trusting eyes of a young classically educated friar.
John is the pupil of the famous philosopher Roger Bacon, trained in the arts of linguistics, medicine and a variety of other sciences. Evidently worried about being accused of heresy, Bacon entrusts a book containing all known knowledge at the time to the young man and secretly sets him off on a pilgrimage to the Pope to demonstrate his master’s knowledge, accompanied by two other fledgling friars he vaguely knows. On this eventful trip he gets to know his two companions, is repeatedly robbed, is […]
A bleak and darkly amusing tale from a master of character-driven plots and social drama.
Tom Keely is a collapsed wreck of a man. A disgraced and rejected environmental activist, he now spends his days drunk in his high-rise flat, venturing outside only for a quick stagger to the shops for ballast and a shot of coffee from a sympathetic café owner, before making his paranoid and unsteady way back. Divorced from both his wife and the world, Keely has all but given up on the country and himself until he comes into contact with a childhood acquaintance Gemma and […]
A frenetic and pulpy injection of dimension-leaping madness.
Like the 90’s TV show Sliders dipped in a swirling pot of multicoloured paint, Black Science traps a small group of scientists and hangers-on in a constantly shuffling world, as they traverse alternative universes hoping to stumble upon the right parts and equipment to fix their machine and head home. Grant McKay, self-professed trailblazer and ‘Anarchist Scientist’ is a conflicted chap. On one hand, he has successfully broken through the barriers of reality with the Pillar, a device of his own creation; but on the other, he’s now trapped […]
Like talking to a cross-section of ordinary people at a pub, England and Other Stories is a collection of twenty-five short stories that peer into everyday worries, thoughts and lives.
These are ordinary people. Mostly male, they are often fixated on small minutia, worried and fixated on something out of their control. The subjects vary wildly, from a weary window cleaner reflecting on his life around London before the recession of 2007; a reunion at a teacher’s funeral that hides an adolescent secret; a suburban oddball with a perchance for alternative medicine and a darker side; or a love letter never delivered to its recipient. Unlike most conventional short stories, the short tales in this […]
Three evocative and delicate short stories from a Japanese master.
Life of a Counterfeiter is the third in a series of recently re-translated works by Inoue that Pushkin Press have released. Containing the titular novella and two other short stories that are appearing in English for the first time, it’s a fine collection of tales dealing with ambition, rejection and the power of memory. Life of a Counterfeiter is narrated by a character who has been hired to write a biography of a celebrated artist called Keigaku, but wracked by writer’s block, the narrator instead […]
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