At the core of Adam Marek’s much-anticipated second short story collection is a single, unifying theme: a parent’s instinct to protect a vulnerable child. Whether set amid unnerving visions of the near-future or grounded in the domestic here and now, these stories demonstrate that, sometimes, only outright surrealism can do justice to the merciless strangeness of reality and that only the fantastically illogical can steel us against what ordinary life threatens. Marek has blended futuristic technology, sinister traditions, and scientifically grounded superpowers into a menagerie where the absurd and the mundane are not merely bedfellows, but interbreed. In these vignettes, absurdism, surrealism, and fantasy bleed into one, causing the reader to take huge imaginative leaps while still keeping one foot firmly in reality. This strange and startling fictional world is accompanied by bonus BackLit materials which include an introduction and overview of Marek’s stories.

Adam Marek's profile page

Adam Marek is an award-winning short story writer. He won the 2011 Arts Foundation Short Story Fellowship and was shortlisted for the inaugural Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. He is the author of Instruction Manual for Swallowing, which was nominated for the Frank O’Connor Prize.

"The stories by this assured British writer are fantastical, inventive, grotesque, sometimes funny, and often disturbing."  —Toronto Star

"Marek's talent for an almost sweet grotesqueness is on full display."  —National Post

"Throw away your preconceptions of the short story, because Adam Marek is single-handedly reviving the genre."—Amy Anderson, Scene (June 2013)

"Wild and engaging"—Michael Hingston, Georgia Straight (June 2013)

"Strongly entertaining and tautly written, these [stories] are for the literary reader who enjoys a sudden twist away from the ordinary." —Booklist (April 2013)