Each of them at a different stage of life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving – in the suburbs of Prague, beside a Belgian motorway, in a cheap Cypriot hotel – to understand just what it means to be alive, here and now.

James and Katherine meet at a wedding in London in 2006, towards the end of the money-for-nothing years. James is a man with a varied past now living alone in a flat in Bloomsbury; They exchange phone numbers at the wedding, but from then on not much goes according to the script...

**WINNER OF THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE 2019**Discover the brilliant new short story collection from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of All That Man IsTwelve people on the move around planet Earth, twelve individual lives, each in turmoil, and each in some way touching the next.

It is 1948 and Aleksandr, a major in the MGB (the forerunner of the KGB) is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic to investigate one of the patients there. The patient is a man long presumed dead - a now severely incapacitated veteran of the Second World War, who seems unable to remember any of his past.