"This collection of short stories by 15 contemporary writers shows a remarkable variety. Journalists Mark Kermode and Paul Morley make first forays into fiction, and dramatists Amanda Dalton and Shelagh Delaney recast themselves as narrators. The anthology features leading poets as storytellersùDavid Constantine, Clare Pollard, Matt Weltonùand novelists at the outset of their careers, including Gwendoline Riley, a <I>Guardian</I> new novelist of the year. Also included are Gerard Woodward and Carl Tighe, both of whom were shortlisted for last year's Whitbread First Novel Prize. There is a Manchester feel to the book, the city at once strange and strangely familiar, in which friendships break up or never quite begin. There are decaying bars and anonymous high windows; lives are relived on home video, deaths are pawed over in a crime photographer's developing fluid; a woman dozing in her bathtub feels a wooden boat sprouting from her head. Real or surreal, the stories prove that, far from being a genre of undeveloped ideas, the short story is alive and well in Britain."