FABULOUS

Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang-master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest controller suspected of paedophilia, and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she'll ever find love. The author with her magnetic qualities uses myth to get at the shimmering violence beneath the dowdy trappings of little England. These ordinary people are preoccupied as many of us are by the deficiencies of the health service, by criminal gangs and homelessness, by the pitfalls of dating in the age of #MeToo. All their stories are inspired by ones drawn from Greco-Roman myth, from the Bible or from folklore. Witty fables, full of sharp-eyed observation. 205pp.