Cover Art By Rachel Dorling

 

On the way home, I tickled a hair I’d found on my chin. It was thin and short but I played with it until it became important under my fingers, like a hair does when it’s stuck in the projector’s gate – a tiny squiggle of hair that swells up into a question mark under the light.

   And the question mark's the size of a wall and you sit there in the dark, staring up at it, waiting for an explosion or a crash or a fight.

   Waiting for something to finally happen.

 

"What kind of a weird arse town spawns Jeanette Winterson, Jim Bowen, Hayley Cropper and Janice Battersby?  The same that fed the warped mind and troubled soul that penned these stories.  If you've ever walked home through drizzle soaked streets in a northern industrial town or been asked if you're courting by an auntie that isn't really an auntie, if you've ever been laughed at for asking for brown bread in a bus station cafe or got stuck to a carpet in an exotically misnamed niteclub on a terraced street...then you will find something in these brilliant stories for you" - Julie Hesmondhalgh, actress.

 

"Dave Swann is, without doubt, one of the most vivid short story writers in the UK today.  He brings the landscape and voices of the North to life with an energy that catapults his characters into the universal.  Pathos. Irresistible comedy.  The raw and beautiful stuff of everyday life.  It's all here". - Alison MacLeod, author of 'The Wave Theory of Angels' (Penguin)

 

"One of those authors whose natural voice seems to effortlessly capture something of the world in which we live" - Steve Haywood, former editor of the BBC's Rough Justice

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