The republic of the mind… It might have been a drug, it might have been something you scored in pub toilets, but it wasn't. It was better than that… One day everybody was going to be there.

In this new edition of James Robertson's shorter fiction, nothing is quite what it seems. From a dysfunctional safari park to an abandoned mental hospital, from a flat overrun by frogs to a South Dakota reservation or a future Scotland riven by ethnic cleansing, the settings of these stories are both nightmarish and real, and the characters who inhabit them often heroic ... Read moreeven in defeat.

Angry, philosophical, funny and humane, James Robertson's stories explore the friendships strong in adversity, marriages heading for the rocks, and the lonely truths of everyday life, with the same deftness of touch that has brought critical acclaim for novels such as And the Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack. This is a collection that will live long in your mind.