Each of the 14 stories feels like a short novel. Vicky Grut has taken inspiration from a range of often ordinary situations and shows how easily things can unravel. They veer from the realistic to the surreal, nothing is quite what it seems, and Vicky's original way of observation is a revelation. These collected stories make you ponder about who is in control of one's destiny. The stories form a series of metaphors covering different aspects of life, and the closing story about the ultimate end is very moving. To give you a flavour of what they are like here are a few snippets: In Rich, two young people travelling towards Florence just after the Bologna bombing of 1980, decide to cadge a meal and a bed for the night from a girl they barely know. In the early hours of the morning, the atmosphere suddenly changes. They are in over their heads. In Mistaken, an academic is mistaken for a shop assistant in a big London department store. When she reacts impulsively she finds herself in trouble. Help comes from an unlikely quarter - and for all the wrong reasons. In Downsizing, Julianne and Tom are all that remain of their company's department of Policy and Evaluation. Julianne reads management theory and they exchange faintly erotic phone calls while they work on their organisational review, until Julianne has a visionary idea. In Live Show, Drink Included, two young people on a day-trip to London decide to see a Soho sex-show, obsessed with getting a free drink, they are in for a surprise. In Into the Valley, a woman tries to comfort her suffering mother-in-law on ward 19 in a small hospital in Wales. Underneath the ward sign it says, in English and in Welsh, `Bereavement Office / Swyddfa Profedigaeth.' There probably isn't a ward 20.

About the Author

Vicky Grut was born in South Africa and lived in Madagascar and Italy before moving to England in 1980 to study fine art at Goldsmiths. She has worked in community arts, for a small independent publisher, as a freelance editor, in the London office of the New Yorker magazine, as a creative writing tutor and, since 2007, as a lecturer in universities, including The Open University, London South Bank and the University of Greenwich. Her first short story was published in 1994 in metropolitan magazine and since then her work has appeared in new writing collections and literary magazines around the world, including collections published by Picador, Granta, Duckworths, Serpents' Tail and Bloomsbury. Vicky was twice a finalist for the Asham Award. Her nonfiction essay Into the Valley, published in Harvard Review #43, was listed as one of the Notable Essays of 2012 in Cheryl Strayed's edition of Best American Essays, 2013. Her story In the Current Climate won the Holland Park Press I is Another contest in 2015. Her novel-in-progress Human Geography was shortlisted for the 2017 Caledonia Novel Award. Two of her stories are published in collections in 2018, one in the Mechanics Institute Review 15, another in the Harvard Review 52. She is married to a Welshman from the Valleys and they have two sons.

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