The 20 stories in this debut collection from David Hayden are strange, uncomfortable fables of memory, metamorphosis, time, disassociation and death: hard to fathom, but impossible to ignore. An undercurrent of primal violence runs through the tales. In the first story, "Egress", a man steps out from a high ledge on his office building, to fall "with fresh delight" and keeps on falling, somehow outside the laws of gravity and time. Another story, "The Bread that was Broken, " records the mannered conversation at a glittering dinner party where the centrepiece is a blackened, smoking corpse.
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