In a Strange Land

Here is a sparkling collection of joined-up stories designed for these disjointed times, for the exiled and the out-of-place. Have you ever felt you are not where you ought to be? Rome’s favourite love poet does; he must now entertain a bunch of unwashed barbarians. A blood-stained dictator finds himself making breakfast for his nine youngest children in a Novotel in Riyadh. On the Edgeware Road, a Syrian ophthalmologist apologises to his girlfriend about a sudden career change whilst, on the other side of the city, a stock-market darling explains, over champagne, how his sudden flight abroad is all part of the strategy. France’s chic empress languishes in the damp Kent countryside – how did it ever come to this? In Beijing, an Ulsterman ducks the bullets; his friendship with the Empress Dowager, for whom he built China’s postal service, is not going to prevent him being massacred. On the Western front a Cumbrian gunner celebrates, finally, his imminent demobilization. The action in this strange little book, stretches from Chislehurst to the Chagos Islands, from Billericay to the Black Sea. What these men and women have in a common is one thing: they are all terribly far from home. And you?