A collection of haunting short stories.
M John Harrison's first book of short stories since 'The Ice Monkey' shows this brilliantly original writer at the height of his powers.
Peter Ebert, obsessed by the record of a 1930s journey through an unknown country, is rescued by a woman whose face is a map. Two holiday-makers known only as Jack and Jill return from Tenerife haunted by the trinket-seller who has brought them together. Meanwhile a refugee from the East encounters fear and loathing in the bars and patisseries of Soho, and a young man undertakes a series of random rail journeys decided by the fall of the Tarot cards.
These stories - in which sex is a choice of transport, travel an interior project, and the world never quite what it seems - explore the undependable boundary between the desired and the possible, and real and the transcendent, discovering humour, horror and a kind of wry glamour in the ordinary.
This is a collection of obliquely fantastic tales, grounded in contemporary reality, into which obtrude flashes of a world beyond our world, a world which would transform the lives of the characters if only they knew how to find it.
